The Sequoyah Birthplace Museum provides an excellent interpretive overview of Overhill Cherokee history, culture and archaeology. Visitors to the Cherokee Heritage trail should consider the museum a point of departure for touring the Overhill Cherokee landscape of eastern Tennessee.
Owned and operated by the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians, the museum is situated on the south end of a five-hundred-acre island created by Tellico Lake. In addition to the museum, the forty-seven-acre complex includes a three hundred-seat amphitheater, a seven-sided open-air pavilion, and picnic tables for visitors' use. From the museum, a 150-yard pathway leads southwest across a field to a grassy mound that serves as a mausoleum for the remains of Cherokees exhumed from the town sites excavated for Tellico Lake.
explore the gift shop, bookstore and gallery that presents the works of Cherokee artists and craftspeople
The museum particularly commemorates Sequoyah, inventor of the Cherokee syllabary, a writing system that transformed the Cherokees into a literate people. Interpretive displays, a video and a life-sized diorama of Sequoyah and his daughter, Ayoka, detail the story of Sequoyah's life and accomplishments as the centerpiece of the exhibit space.
Events
The Sequoyah Birthplace Museum schedules guest lectures, crafts demonstrations and special events throughout the year.
The annual Fall Festival held in conjunction with the Fort Loudoun Eighteenth Century Trade Faire the first weekend after Labor Day in September. The Fall Festival is a celebration of Cherokee heritage and life highlighting Cherokee crafts people, artists and demonstrators. The two-day event features traditional dancing, stickball games, blowgun demonstrations and a variety of native foods such as fry bread and bean bread.
Nancy Ward Days held each spring at the museum are designed for K-12 students: school field trips, home school students, Girl and Boy Scouts, youth organizations as well as the general public. Activities include demonstrations and lessons in crafts, music and dance, storytelling, food, history and lifeways, games, and much more.
Sequoyah Birthplace Museum
PO Box 69; Highway 360
Vonore, TN 37885
(423) 884-6246
www.sequoyahmuseum.org
Directions & Hours of Operation - View
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Fort Loudoun State Historic Area
The great King George has ordered his children, the Cherokees, and the English to love each other as Brothers and to live together as one people, to assist each other upon all Occasions and to go Hand and Hand together. All you Headmen and Warriours who are here present know this to be true. You sometime ago asked for a Fort to be built in the Upper Part of your Nation to be garrisoned by your Brothers the English, for the protection of your Women and children when your Warriours are out a Hunting, and yourselves in case of Need. You all see that we are - come up to you with Workmen and Artificers to build you a Fort and Warriours to garrison the same when finished - what greater Marks of our Esteem could we possible give you than serving you in this Particular?
- Captain Raymond Demere, commander of Fort Loudoun, 1757
After leaving the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum, visitors should tour nearby Fort Loudoun State Historic Area to become further acquainted with Anglo-Cherokee relations, diplomacy and trade in the mid-eighteenth century. The state park, which fronts on the former Little Tennessee River channel, share Great Island with Sequoyah Birthplace Museum and is located approximately 1 mile to the northeast. The park features a reconstruction of Fort Loudoun, a state-maintained visitor center with well developed interpretive exhibits, walking trails, a large picnic area, and access to Tellico Lake. A reconstruction of an eighteenth-century Cherokee winter house with a garden plot, helps convey the important Cherokee role in the history of Fort Loudoun.
Fort Loudoun (1756-60), the first British military outpost west of the southern Appalachians, was founded at the request of pro-British Cherokee factions at Chota, who needed the fort and garrison to deter raiding on the Overhill Towns by French-allied Indians, to regulate trade and police unscrupulous traders, and to discourage French sentiment in some Overhill Towns.
While touring the Fort Loudoun State Historic Area:
explore a replica 18th Century Cheorkee Winter House and garden
Events
Fort Loudoun comes alive during the 18th Century Trade Faire, and annual reencactment cent held concurrently with the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum Fall Festival the first weekend after Labor Day in September. Modern regenerators dressed in period costume as British Colonial Soldiers, soldiers wives and children, traders and Cherokee men and women, a two-day bazaar which features mid-eighteenth century crafts, food and music.
18th Century Christmas traditions are featured at Fort Loudoun each December. Workshops and special events feature crafts, music and holiday activities.
A living history weekend features the Independent Company of South Carolina during Garrison Weekends throughout the year. This group recreates the lives of the soldiers and civilians who originally occupied Fort Loudoun. While in garrison the daily activities of a frontier fort are carried out. The soldiers drill with muskets and cannon. Food is cooked in the bake oven and in the fireplaces. The Cherokee come to trade. A real touch of the 18th Century returns to Fort Loudoun.
Tellico Blockhouse
Across the lake from Fort Loudoun is the site of Tellico Blockhouse, a fort built in 1794 by the US government to preserve the fragile peach between the Cherokees and white Americans. Stone foundations of fort buildings exposed by archaeological investigations during the 1970s have been stabilized for pubic visitation and the former wooden fortifications walls are now represented by a low enclosure of pilings. Interpretive exhibits interspersed among these ruing tell the story of the Tellico Blockhouse and its role in maintaining order along the Cherokee frontier and promoting the “civilization” policy of the US government. Visitors to the site can wander among the foundations and look across the river toward the old Cherokee Nation.
Fort Loudoun State Historic Area
338 Fort Loudoun Road; Vonore, TN 37885
(423) 884-6217
www.fortloudoun.com
Directions & Hours of Operation - View
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The Sequoyah Birthplace Museum provides an excellent interpretive overview of Overhill Cherokee history, culture and archaeology. Visitors to the Cherokee Heritage trail should consider the museum a point of departure for touring the Overhill Cherokee landscape of eastern Tennessee.