Icehouse Bottom - Historical Information

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.