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One of the most historic sites in Cherokee history-the Long Island in the Holston River at Kingsport, Tennessee-is now another kind of historic site, the wastewater treatment facility for the city’s nearly century-old mega-corporation, Eastman Chemical Company.
In 1920, Eastman Kodak’s founder, George Eastman, freed the U.S. from its dependency on European photo-processing materials by setting up a wood-distilling plant in east Tennessee.
By 1960, the company, Tennessee Eastman, was not only making methanol, acetone, and acetates, but also fibers, explosives, antioxidants, cigarette filters, and adhesives.
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The introduction of a new product, Kodel polyester fiber, in 1959 required Eastman to transfer its coal storage yards to Long Island, which by then had become a working class community with its own elementary school.Environmental regulations in the Johnson-Nixon years led Eastman to enlarge its footprint, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on pollution abatement facilities.Long Island’s local population shrank.
The river, South Fork of the Holston, to which the Overhill Cherokee had once gravitated, has also changed over the years, having been straightened, dredged, bridged, deadened, and cleaned.
“In 1960, nobody fished in the South Fork of the Holston, ” the Kingsport “Times-News” quoted Richard Strang, an Eastman environmental director in 2015.By 2006, “the river was delisted from (the EPA) impaired list and (was) meeting all water quality standards, ” Strang said.
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A footbridge from Riverside Park to the northern end of Long Island leads to a stone monument representing seven Cherokee clans.A plaque reads: “Sacred Cherokee ground/Relinquished by treaty on Jan. 7, 1806.3.61 acres returned to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians by the City of Kingsport on July 16, 1976.”
In 1960, the island had received National Historic Landmark status.At the time that the Eastern Band had gotten its piece of land, trees were growing in drainage ditches in the village part and the city said the community was a slum, needy of urban renewal funds.
By 1996, the historic site’s state of neglect led the National Park Service to recommended withdrawal of historic status due to “loss of historical integrity.”(The site retains its status.)
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The MeadowView Conference Resort & Convention Center, up the James H. Quillen Parkway from Kingsport, is owned partly by the Convention Center, which runs the golf course; and by Eastman, which owns the restaurant and hotel.
The MeadowView hotel operations manager, when I spoke with him in 2006, had his head very much in the present moment and was unaware of ancient history.
“Did you know the Cherokee used Long Island as a kind of Camp David?, ” I asked.“I’ve lived here all my life and I didn’t know about that, ” he said.He knew a lot about Eastman, which now employs about 14, 000 in Kingsport.
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Immediately before Eastman on the island, there had been the 1925 subdivision, Long Island Gardens; before that, Leeper’s Dairy Farm; and, going back 200 years, Southern plantation life.
Cocke, a Virginia lawyer, had worked with Daniel Boone opening up the Wilderness Road from Long Island to Kentucky. As a militia colonel, he’d led punishing campaigns against Cherokees in the mountainsand that’s when he’d sold the island.He would go on to lead the independent State of Franklin movement, become a U.S. Senator and write the Tennessee state constitution.
Samuel Woods had emigrated from England at age 18 to join two brothers in America in 1755.He’d fought with Col. George Washington and General Braddock at Fort Duquesne.Starting a new family with Sarah Rieves, he’d purchased Long Island in advance of his move to then North Carolina, but the deed meant little.
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The Cherokee held onto ownership, according to the 1777 Long Island of the Holston Treaty, until 1806 when agents for Thomas Jefferson’s Secretary of War, Thomas Dearborn, purchased the island.In 1810, Samuel Woods’ heirs made a successful claim and his son-in-law, Richard Netherland, husband of Margaret Woods, bought out other family members.
Netherland, son of a Virginia planter, brought not only his wife, but also 10 children and dozens of slaves.He built a manor house, many other buildings, a saw mill, a gristmill, a hemp factory, a store, a still, barns, and roads.
“In a few years’ time, ” Muriel Spoden states in her book, “Kingsport Heritage: The Early Years, 1700 to 1900, ” “the sacred Indian Long Island became a flourishing plantation and prominent industrial development.”
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The colonial crisis that had led the Cherokee to side with the British in the Revolutionary War and that had caused non-militant chiefs to cede their east Tennessee land had followed a century of intermingling of peoples on equal footing.
In 1673, fur traders James Needham and Gabriel Arthur had come from Fort Henry on the Virginia frontier to scope out the Overhill region.The explorers passed “turkes deere, ellkes, beare, woolfe and other vermin very tame, ” Needham’s sponsor, Abraham Wood, reported in a 1674 letter to a friend in London.
With their guide, Indian John, an Occaneechi from piedmont North Carolina, the party crossed a channel (probably not to Long Island, but close by) and were entertained with “cerrimonies of courtesies, ” and presented with an “aboundance of corne and all manner of pulse with fish, flesh and beares oyle for ye horse to feed upon and a scaffold sett up” so that the Cherokee “might stand and gaze at them and not offend them by theire throng.”
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Arthur stayed behind to learn the language.Needham and John went back to the fort to report.On their return trip, the two “began feuding over the white man’s treatment of one of the Tomahitin, ” John’s tribe, engaged to carry packs, George Ellison relates in his book, “High Vistas: An Anthology of Nature Writing from Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains, Volume II.”
The fur trading dynamic continued for 90 years.In 1750, Dr. Thomas Walker, agent for the Loyal Land Company of Virginia arrived at Long Island to survey an 800, 000-acre tract received in a grant.
In 1754, English traders Richard Pearis, Thomas Price, and Nathaniel Gist built cabins on the island.They established stores.Pearis and Gist married Cherokee women.In 1776, Gist and his wife, Wurteh Watts, great-granddaughter of Chief Motoy, bore a son named Sequoyah, creator of the Syllabary for the Cherokee Language.
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The era of co-existence ended dramatically in 1759 when the Cherokee War erupted after settlers had attacked and killed several Cherokee warriors returning from battles against the French and the Cherokee responded with equalizing reprisals.
By 1768, land cessions had begun, as had raids and scorched earth campaigns against the Cherokee.On July 20, 1777, “subscribing chiefs” of the Cherokee Nation in the Overhill region met with N.C. commissioners to make a treaty.
“Hostilities, ” the treaty stated, “shall forever cease between the said Overhill Indians and the people of North-Carolina.”The Cherokee had to give back all the prisoners, horses, cattle and other property they’d captured or taken.The Cherokee could hand over to agents any person going into the Overhill territory without permission from North Carolina.They also must turn over any runaway slaves.A line was fixed, at least until 1785 and the Treaty of Hopewell; and then 1791 and the Treaty of the Holston; and then 1806 and the Dearborn Treaty.
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Rob Neufeld writes the weekly local history feature, “Visiting Our Past, ” for the and may be reached at RNeufeld@charter.net or 768-2665.
