Historical Information
Although there is little historical information regarding Icehouse Bottom itself, numerous historical areas were located within a two-mile (3 km) radius. Fort Loudoun, a frontier fort built in 1756, was located approximately one mile to the north, and the Tellico Blockhouse, a federal trading outpost built in 1794, was located just over mile to the northeast. The Overhill Cherokee villages of Tomotley and Toqua were located opposite Rockcrusher Bluff to the south. The Overhill village of Tuskegee, which is best known as the birthplace of the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah, was located almost immediately northwest of the Icehouse Bottom site.
In 1819, the Cherokee sold the Overhill territory south of the Little Tennessee River to the United States government, which included all of what is now Monroe County. Shortly thereafter, an early settler named "Pioneer" John McGhee purchased several thousand acres along the Little Tennessee River, including the Icehouse Bottom site, and established a series of plantations in the area. By the early 1900s, the Icehouse Bottom site was part of a tobacco farm owned by John Carson. Carson's family was in possession of the land when the Tennessee Valley Authority began buying property along the river for the creation of the Tellico Reservoir.
Although it's unclear how Icehouse Bottom got its name, historian Carson Brewer wrote of a McGhee family story that recalled an "ice-house" located on their lands in the Little Tennessee Valley in the 1800s. According to Brewer, a hole approximately 30 feet (9.1 m) in circumference would be dug in winter, and ice would be cut from the river or a frozen stream, placed in the hole, and covered with sand. This preserved the ice through the following summer.
Read more about this topic: Icehouse Bottom
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or information:
“In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.”
—George Grosz (1893–1959)
“Computers are good at swift, accurate computation and at storing great masses of information. The brain, on the other hand, is not as efficient a number cruncher and its memory is often highly fallible; a basic inexactness is built into its design. The brain’s strong point is its flexibility. It is unsurpassed at making shrewd guesses and at grasping the total meaning of information presented to it.”
—Jeremy Campbell (b. 1931)