History
Substantial Native American settlements existed at the Nolichucky's Big Limestone Creek confluence as early as the Woodland period (1000 B.C. - 1000 A.D.) and continued sporadically for several centuries. Heavy cultivation in the 19th and 20th centuries destroyed much of the site's prehistoric value, although excavators unearthed numerous projectile points and other cultural material scattered by prehistoric inhabitants.
Euro-American settlers began arriving in the Nolichucky valley after the French and Indian War. In 1771, a merchant named Jacob Brown established the Nolichucky Settlement, which included much of the current park lands. Brown initially leased the land from the Cherokee and purchased it in 1775. The settlement aligned itself with the nearby Watauga Association during the American Revolution and became part of Washington County, North Carolina in 1777. In 1783, the Nolichucky Settlement and several other settlements split off from Washington County to form Greene County. A speculator named George Gillespie purchased the land in 1782, and Gillespie would be the property's owner at the time of Crockett's birth. Samuel Stonecypher purchased the property in 1824, and the Stonecypher family was still in possession of the property when the Davy Crockett Birthplace Association purchased it in the 1950s. The DCBA established the park and transferred ownership to the state of Tennessee in 1973.
Read more about this topic: Davy Crockett Birthplace State Park
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. However, the two sides are not to be divided off; as long as men exist the history of nature and the history of men are mutually conditioned.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)