A Near View of the Chickamauga Dam and Lock.
About the year 1815, following the close of the Creek War, John Ross, Cherokee, and Timothy Meigs, son of Return J. Meigs, the Indian Agent, established a trading post seven miles south of the Chickamauga Dam. They operated a ferry as well as a general store. The place became known as Ross’ Landing, but when the Indians had departed for the lands in the West, the whites had the town surveyed, and the name was changed to Chattanooga. John P. Long became the first postmaster, March 22, 1837. However, this was not the first post office established in the old Cherokee lands, for on April 5, 1817, Rossville post office was established four miles to the south with John Ross as postmaster. This was said to have been the first post office established in this part of the Cherokee Nation.
The word Chattanooga is a corruption in the spelling of the Muskogean word Chatanugi, which years previously had been the name of Lookout Mountain, meaning “rock coming to a point.” In the narrow valley between the east side of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge is a small stream which was also known as Chatanugi Creek. Near its mouth where it empties into the Tennessee was, in the 18th century, a small Indian village by the same name.
It is an interesting geological fact that in ages past the water we now know as the Tennessee River flowed south of the east base of Lookout Mountain and emptied into the Coosa River in what is now Alabama. A later upheaval blocked its southern passage and forced it to seek a new route, which it did by cutting out its way through the rough rocks of the Cumberlands.
The town of Chattanooga kept growing and was chosen as the county seat. Harrison, which for many years had been full of promise for growing into a large and thriving city, began to dwindle until it was left behind as an ordinary village, which was wiped off of the map by the waters after the building of the Chickamauga Dam. The forming of the Chickamauga Lake created so many beautiful sites along its margin that hundreds of families could not resist the advantages offered by the board of the TVA to take up sites for summer homes and camps. At various places on the lake are to be found beautiful cottages and bungalows where families enjoy recreation as well as the pure atmosphere and the cool currents of air that come from the fresh waters. There they enjoy boating, fishing and other sports, not only along the shores of Harrison Bay State Park, but also at Soddy and other choice situations. When the town of Harrison was obliterated by the impounded waters of Chickamauga Lake, there came into existence new Harrison, whose people today enjoy boating and fishing where Joseph Vann and other Cherokees once produced crops of hay and corn.
HIWASSEE ISLAND
A few miles upstream from the obliterated Dallas Island there was located until the completion of the Chickamauga Dam, the second largest island in the Tennessee River. This was Hiwassee Island, which contained 781 acres, was two miles long, and a mile wide. It received its name from the Hiwassee River, which finds the Tennessee east of the island.
Beginning in 1937 and continuing for two consecutive years the Archaelogical Department of the University of Tennessee succeeded in completing the excavations of all village sites and mounds on this historical island. The result of these investigations were published in 1946 by the University Press, Knoxville, in a book entitled the Hiwassee Island, by T. M. N. Lewis and Madeline Kneberg.
When the white settlers came into Tennessee, they found Hiwassee Island was being ruled by the honest and kind-hearted Cherokee Chief Oolooteeskee, popularly known as John Jolly. In 1809, when Sam Houston was 16 years old, he visited Hiwassee Island. Chief Jolly became so fond of the lad that he adopted him, rechristening him The Raven.