History
Native Americans have been hunting and camping in the Sumner County area for over 12,000 years. Artifacts dating to the Paleo-Indian and Archaic periods have been found in the park's vicinity, and a substantial Mississippian-period (c. 1000-1500 A.D.) village was located at nearby Castalian Springs. The Sumner region was probably part of Shawnee territory throughout the 17th century, although they had been expelled by the Cherokee and Chickasaw by around 1700.
The first major Euro-American expeditions into Sumner County were led by long hunters, so called because the relatively long duration of their hunting expeditions. Long hunter Henry Scaggs was hunting along the Cumberland as early as 1765, and James Smith led the first major long hunting expedition into the Cumberland region in 1766. Between 1769 and 1772, a large group of long hunters were active in the Upper Cumberland region, among them Kasper Mansker and Isaac Bledsoe (c. 1735-1794). At one point the expedition established a base camp along Station Camp Creek (giving the creek its name) a few miles west of modern Gallatin. In 1772, Bledsoe discovered the creek and salt lick that now bear his name (the lick was near modern Castalian Springs). In the early 1780s, at the end of the American Revolution, Bledsoe returned to the salt lick and built Bledsoe's Station, one of a series of small forts erected to protect early Middle Tennessee settlers from hostile Native Americans.
Hostility between Native Americans and Euro-American settlers increased throughout the 1780s as Euro-American settlers flooded into the Middle Tennessee region. Colonel Anthony Bledsoe (1733–1787), an older brother of Isaac, reported to the governor of North Carolina that 14 settlers had been killed in 1786 alone. Anthony Bledsoe himself was killed in an ambush at Bledsoe's Station the following year. In 1791, Jacob Ziegler built Ziegler's Fort near what is now Bledsoe Creek State Park. The fort was overrun within a few months, however, after a day-long attack that killed Ziegler and several others. The threat of Native American attacks finally subsided in 1794 with the end of the Chickamauga Wars.
After the State of Tennessee was created in 1796, the state's legislature passed a resolution calling for the creation of a county seat for Sumner County. The new city was to be named "Ca Ira" after a song made popular by the French Revolution. Bickering among the county commissioners delayed the establishment of the city for several years, and they eventually decided to place the seat in Gallatin. In 1799, General James Winchester (1752–1826) and William Cage, Jr. purchased 150 acres (0.61 km2) immediately south of Ziegler's Fort at the confluence of Bledsoe's Creek and the Cumberland River for the establishment of a town. The new town's name, "Cairo", was either a corruption of Ca Ira— the name chosen for the county seat— or was selected by Winchester, a fan of ancient history (Winchester was later instrumental in the establishment of Memphis, also named after an Egyptian city).
Cairo quickly became one of the key river trading hubs in the Upper Cumberland region. Winchester and Cage established a mercantile business and a successful flatboat trade between Cairo and New Orleans. By 1812, the city had its own cotton mill, woolen mill, saw mill, gristmill, still house, and tavern. The death of Winchester in 1826 and the improvement and shift of the main road between Knoxville and Nashville away from Sumner, however, led to Cairo's eventual decline. In 1923, the Cairo community took advantage of Rosenwald Funds to establish a school for African-American children, which operated until 1959. The Cairo Rosenwald School, located just north of Bledsoe Creek State Park, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996.
Read more about this topic: Bledsoe Creek State Park
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