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Old treaty line survives as USFS boundary
Though we’ve all passed the historical marker on Business 23 between Sylva Animal Hospital and WestCare Medical Park numerous times, only its heading, engraved in all capital letters, is readable from a car traveling at the speed limit. It is therefore likely many county residents don’t know that the sign commemorates what is probably the most influential land survey ever completed in Jackson County.
If you pull off the road, into either the vet’s or doctors’ offices parking lot, the entire text is legible: “INDIAN BOUNDARY. Near here the highway crosses Meigs-Freeman Line surveyed in 1802. Boundary between whites and Cherokees until 1819.”
Surveyed by Thomas Freeman under the direction of United States Commissioner Return J. Meigs, the Meigs-Freeman Line stretches from a post near Mt. Collins on the crest of the Great Smoky Mountains southeast to the North Carolina/South Carolina line. From its starting point, called “Meigs’ Post” on USGS topo maps and “Hawkins and Meigs Post” in George Smathers’ The History of Land Titles in Western North Carolina, the line follows the compass heading south 52 degrees east, passing east of Sylva near Beta and roughly paralleling the north bank of the Tuckaseigee River.
Continuing across Jackson County’s northeastern portion, the Meigs-Freeman Line crosses Parker Knob between Wayehutta and Moses Creek, Caney Fork near the Johns Creek confluence and N.C. 281 at Argura before exiting the county north of Owens Gap. A short stretch of N.C. 281, the portion between the highway’s intersections with Charleys Creek (S.R. 1756) and Neddie Mountain (S.R. 1757) roads roughly follows the Meigs-Freeman Line.
What is most interesting, in looking at a map of the Nantahala National Forest, is that the remnants of Meigs-Freeman are readily apparent. The line that once separated Indian settlements and white farmland now forms much of the boundary between Jackson County’s U.S. National Forest and privately owned land.
The Meigs-Freeman Line was initially surveyed to satisfy the terms of the Tellico Treaty of 1798, by which the Cherokee agreed to relinquish title to that portion of their lands that lay east of an agreed-upon boundary, the precise location of which was subsequently determined by Freeman’s 1802 survey.
Around the time of the treaty, the state of North Carolina began issuing large land grants for the territory east of the Meigs-Freeman Line. Under these grants, a few individuals, including David Allison and William Cathcart, were given title to vast areas in what was then Buncombe County. These grants included portions of present-day Jackson County – in Caney Fork and Canada townships – that now comprise the U.S. Forest Service’s Roy Taylor Forest.
The Jackson County holdings by and large became part of the Highland Forest Co., a timber company based in New York City. Highland Forest owned some 45,100 acres and extended from Willets to the Transylvania County line and from the Southern Railway line to the “high ridge extending from Richland Balsam to Tennessee (Tanassee) Bald,” part of the route of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Its south and southwest boundary line was the Meigs-Freeman Line, and it included the following watersheds: Dark Ridge Creek; Lick Log Creek; Cassie Branch; Sugar Loaf Creek; Soapstone Branch; Ochre Creek; Gunther Branch; Cane Creek; Weary Hut (Wayehutta) Creek; Moses Creek; Caney Fork; John’s Creek; Sol’s Creek; Wolf Creek; Tennessee Creek and Milk Sick Cove.
(Information about Highland Forest was taken from a booklet, Report on Highland Forest, prepared in 1907 by C.A. Schenck, chief forester for George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate. The booklet is housed in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)
Highland Forest sold its Jackson County holdings to Jackson Lumber Co., and Jackson transferred the majority of the acreage to Blackwood Lumber Co. (According to Smathers, Champion Fiber purchased some 5,000 acres in the Scotts Creek watershed from Jackson Lumber; Blackwood obtained most of the rest.) Mead Corp. acquired the bulk of Blackwood’s former holdings in 1945, and operated a 40,000-acre woodlot for its paper plant in Sylva. Mead closed its local operation in 1974 and sold its forest to the W.R. Field family of Florida. The Field family transferred title to the U.S. Forest Service in 1980.
It is the property acquired from Mead that now makes up most of Jackson County’s public land: the Roy Taylor National Forest.
Looking back on history, it seems ironic that these first, enormous, speculative land grants that lay east of the Meigs-Freeman Line are the ones that persisted as undivided tracts and eventually passed back into the public domain.
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