Tuskegee

Tuskegee (also spelled Toskegee, Taskigi, and similar variations) was an Overhill Cherokee town located along the lower Little Tennessee River in what is now Monroe County, Tennessee, United States. The town developed in the late 1750s alongside Fort Loudoun, and was inhabited until the late 1770s. It was forcibly evacuated and probably burned during the Cherokee–American wars. Tuskegee is perhaps best known as the birthplace of Sequoyah (Cherokee, c.1770-1843), a craftsman and polymath who independently created the Cherokee syllabary as an effective writing system for his language. He is one of the few people from a pre-literate society known in recorded history for such an achievement. The Tuskegee town site was investigated by archaeologists in the 1970s, as part of a survey and excavations of known sites prior to inundation of the valley after completion of the Tellico Dam in 1979. History Early explorers made several maps and wrote accounts of the Overhill country, but Tuskegee is not mentioned or noted before 1757. But a map by William G. De Brahm, the engineer who designed the fort, notes a place called "Taskigee old Town" near one of the proposed sites for the fort (the term "old town" often denoted a cleared or previously inhabited area, and this area is known to have been inhabited for thousands of years by indigenous peoples).