I've been telling you happy tales, so let me stop and tell you a hard one, because this beautiful road runs right alongside one of the saddest paths in American history, and you ought to know it.
Long before any pavement, there was an old Cherokee trading path across these mountains, worn deep by generations of moccasined feet. In eighteen sixteen it got formalized into something called the Unicoi Turnpike — a toll road for driving livestock and hauling goods between Tennessee and Georgia. For a while it was just commerce, just the ordinary traffic of a living people in their own homeland.
And then came eighteen thirty-eight. You've heard of the Trail of Tears — the forced removal of the Cherokee from these mountains, driven west at bayonet point to Oklahoma, thousands dying along the way. What you may not know is that this country, right here, was one of the places it began. Cherokee families were rounded up into stockade forts — one of them, Fort Montgomery, stood right down at Robbinsville where you're headed — and marched away along that same old Unicoi road, the trading path of their ancestors turned into a road of exile. They walked out of these very valleys, over these very ridges, and most of them never came home.
So as you drive this gorgeous high country, hold two things in your mind at once. It is breathtaking. And it is somebody's lost homeland, taken by force within a few long lifetimes of now. The Cherokee are still here — never fully left, as you'll hear — but this land remembers what was done. Drive it beautiful. Drive it aware. Both at once. That's the only honest way.
Photo: Wolfgang Sauber · CC BY-SA 3.0
