Long Island and the Cherokee

Before Sullivan County had a name, before Tennessee was a territory, before the United States existed, the Cherokee people knew this land. And at the center of their relationship with this landscape was Long Island of the Holston — a place of council, ceremony, and ultimately, of treaties that would reshape a continent.

Long Island sits in the Holston River within what is now Kingsport, Tennessee. For the Cherokee, the island held deep spiritual and practical significance. It was a council ground — a place where leaders gathered to discuss matters of war, peace, trade, and diplomacy. The island's position in the river gave it a natural separation from the surrounding land, creating a space that was both accessible and set apart.

The Cherokee presence in the Holston River valley predated European contact by centuries. Their towns, trails, and agricultural clearings shaped the landscape that European settlers would later encounter and describe as "wilderness." But it was not wilderness. It was home.

In July 1777, as the American Revolution raged along the eastern seaboard, a different kind of conflict was playing out in the Appalachian frontier. Settlers pushing into Cherokee territory had provoked a series of violent confrontations. The Overhill Cherokee, led by chiefs who recognized that the military balance was shifting, agreed to negotiate.

The resulting Treaty of Long Island (also called the Treaty of Avery) was negotiated on the island between Cherokee leaders and agents of Virginia and North Carolina. The treaty ceded a significant portion of Cherokee land in the Holston River region, opening the territory to accelerated Euro-American settlement.

The treaty was one of many such agreements in the late 18th century — part of a systematic process by which Cherokee territory was reduced through a combination of military pressure, diplomatic negotiation, and settler encroachment. From the Cherokee perspective, each treaty represented a painful loss of homeland. From the settler perspective, each treaty opened new land for farms, towns, and the westward expansion that would define the new American republic.

Both perspectives are true simultaneously. Neither can be understood without the other.

The land ceded through the Treaty of Long Island and subsequent agreements made possible everything that followed in Sullivan County: the organization of the county in 1779, the establishment of Blountville as county seat, the settlement of farms like William Cobb's in Piney Flats, and eventually the organization of the Southwest Territory with its capitol at Rocky Mount.

Governor William Blount's administration of the Southwest Territory (1790-1796) involved ongoing diplomacy with Cherokee leaders. The relationship was complex — Blount was tasked with both governing the settlers and maintaining peace with the Cherokee, objectives that were frequently in tension. Treaties negotiated during this period continued to reduce Cherokee territory, and the consequences of those agreements echo through the centuries.

Long Island of the Holston exists today within the city of Kingsport. Interpretive markers tell part of the story. The island itself is quiet — a green space along the river that gives little outward indication of the monumental events that occurred there.

Visiting Long Island requires holding two truths at once: this is a place of profound historical significance for both the Cherokee people and the American nation that emerged from their dispossession. The treaties negotiated here were legal agreements made under pressure, and their consequences — the removal of Cherokee people from their ancestral homeland, culminating in the Trail of Tears in the 1830s — represent one of the deepest moral wounds in American history.

Sullivan County's story cannot be told honestly without the Cherokee chapter. The land that settlers farmed, the territory that Blount governed, the state that emerged in 1796 — all of it rests on ground that was Cherokee homeland first. Long Island reminds us of that truth, and honoring that truth is part of what it means to tell this story right.

When you stand on Long Island, you are standing on sacred ground. Please treat it with the respect it deserves.