In 1700, the river bottoms surrounding present day Hayesville were home to a thriving Cherokee community called Quanassee. The heart of the village was a townhouse, a combined civic center, council house, and temple that was located atop the mound (today called the Spikebuck Mound) that still stands on the bank of the Hiwassee River. Adjacent to the townhouse was an open plaza for ceremonies, dances and games. Individual homes ringed the plaza, and each family maintained a circular winter house and a rectangular summer house, with a small corn house or two. Surrounding the town were orchards, gardens and fields of corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, tobacco and other crops, a half acre for each person in the village.

Archaelogical evidence indicates that Quanassee was a substantial settlement as early as 1550, and most of Spikebuck mound was constructed before the first English explorers came to the area in the 1690s. In 1716, South Carolina officials Col. George Chicken and Major John Herbert met with Cherokee leaders at Quanassee to secure Cherokee alliance in the Yamassee War. In 1717, South Carolina established a public trading "factory" (store and warehouse) at Quanassee to supply the region with English manufactured goods in exchange for deerskins and other Cherokee commodities. The main route between the English settlement in South Carolina and the Cherokee towns in Tennessee passed through Quanassee, and the town became a bustling trade center.

In its heyday, Quanassee was home to several hundred people, but by 1721, it was among the smallest Cherokee towns, with only 104 people (37 men, 31 women, and 36 children). The threat of attack during the protracted Creek-Cherokee War (ca 1716-1752) drove many townspeople to seek more secure settlements. Their fears were well founded; in 1725m a Coosa (Creek) war party "cut off" Quanassee, destroying the town and killing or enslaving most of its inhabitants. The settlement was defunct for many years, but a new community established itself at Quanassee prior to the American Revolution. In 1776, Rutherford expedition forces "campt at Quannasy Town on hywasey" before razing the Cherokee Valley Towns. When Benjamin Hawkins passed through the area in 1797, he saw that "...on the left bank of this was the town of Quannasee, for many years the residene of Cornelius Daughterty, an old Irish trader; at present there is nothing remaining of the old town except open flats where were formerly the corn fields..." The area was known as Quanassee into the 1820's, when Baptist missionaries came to preach to families living at "Quansee."

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Show me all markers in:  Hayesville, NC  |  Clay County  |  28904  |  North Carolina  |  United States of America

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