First on the Mountain?
The University of the South is situated on 13,000 acres of what was once Native-owned land. Among the university’s founding mythologies was Manifest Destiny, which echoed strongly in the university’s founding cornerstone speech in 1860. The speaker, John S. Preston, envisioned the university on the precipice of an older wilderness and frontier, the new cornerstone located “beneath the very oaks which sheltered our fathers from the storms of Heaven and the Indian rifle.” Preston described the university’s founding as the dawn of a new civilization, founded on slavery, in a place with no evidence of a human past. “There is no antiquity here,” he claimed, “no monuments here marking the vestiges of man… no fragmentary memorial of lost civilization”— no pyramids, Parthenon, Coliseum, or cathedrals. Preston went so far as to say: “We are the first. We are primeval here.”1 In a few short years, the cornerstone was destroyed by U.S. soldiers during the Civil War, leaving no trace of the monument consecrated by this proslavery Ozymandias.2
Indigenous Origins of the “Domain”
Despite the claims of Native erasure at the center of the university’s founding, there is abundant evidence of the long history of Indigenous presence on “the Mountain.” Archaeological evidence indicates human habitation as early as 9,000 years ago in Sewanee, and earlier in the surrounding region. Native people hunted game and harvested plant foods here, leaving evidence of hickory nut processing, suggesting patterns of seasonal habitation around rock shelters. Early pictographs and petroglyphs (or rock art) are found throughout the area, suggesting ritual practices through generations of Native people who used red iron oxides to make handprints and depict animals, humans, and geometric designs. 3 Though evidence of agriculture or permanent settlement is limited on our sandy soil here, it would be a mistake to assume that these lands were only “hunting grounds”—a term which was used as justification for taking Native land.
The University “Domain” is situated on land ceded by the Chickasaw Nation in 1805 and ceded by the Cherokee Nation in 18064. These cessions followed the Revolutionary expansion of the United States which included the campaign of extermination against the nearby Chickamauga town of Nickajack in 1794 (perhaps the Indian conflict Preston alluded to in the cornerstone speech). Early white settlers recalled that “Sewanee was the Nation,” recognizing that they were occupying land along the border with the Cherokee Nation. Mvskoke (Muscogee/Creek) forces continued to exercise power over the area, their raids around the War of 1812 convincing early settlers to build a fort at nearby Roark’s Cove.5 White citizens in this part of Franklin County formed militias, attacking Cherokees in 1813 and threatening further violence on “your side of the mountain,” near what is now the Marion County line. 6 Cherokees called for peace, serving as U.S. allies in the Creek War of 1813–1814. At the center of this volunteerism were famous Cherokee leaders who lived just below Sewanee—Lieutenant Colonel John Lowrey and his brother Major George Lowrey, later to become Assistant Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.7
Though the University Domain land was developed through the formation of Franklin County in 1807, Cherokee presence in the area continued long afterwards. Through the Treaty of 1819, the extended Lowrey family remained from “the foot of Cumberland Mountain” to the Tennessee River, but faced violent dispossession in the 1820s.8 This was a prelude to the more familiar “Trail of Tears” of 1838-1839. The Bell Route of the Trail of Tears, one of several used in Cherokee “Removal,” crosses the University Domain. In late October 1838, a group of about 650 Cherokees traveled through “Cumberland Mountain” (now Sewanee).9 This detachment, sometimes called the “Treaty Party (so called),” was led by John Adair Bell, a signer of the infamous Treaty of New Echota.10
Lost in Translation? Origins of the Name “Sewanee”
“Sewanee” is a place name of suspected Indigenous origins, which has been the subject of competing theories. In the 1850s, critics of the proposed location for the university spread a rumor that “Sewanee” translated to “milk sickness.”11 University founders countered this interpretation, claiming sarcastically that students were equally at risk “from the Indians who once roamed over these hills and swarmed in these valleys.”12 This was the ideology of Native erasure which later echoed in the cornerstone speech of 1860.
University founder Charles Todd Quintard claimed that “Sewanee” was Cherokee for “Mother Mountain.”13 In the 1880s Sewanee’s Vice Chancellor was told that the name means “lost” in the Shawnee language, a term used for “a person who starts for a given place and unexpectedly arrives at a very different one.”14 This oddly specific definition was among several convenient interpretations for university promoters to advertise the mysterious allure of this foggy place.
Sewanee is most likely a version of “Shawnee,” an Algonquian word for a tribal name: sawanwa, meaning “person of the South.” As indicated in this name, Shawnees spread from their Ohio Valley homelands through the South, leaving their mark with various place names including the Savannah and Suwanee rivers.15 This naming pattern continued with the “Sewanee” or “Shawnee” river, the “Indian name” for the Cumberland River near Nashville. Shawnees there were driven north by Cherokees and Chickasaws, but settlers around Nashville remembered the area had been occupied by the “Suwanee Indians.”16 Language experts at Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology concluded that “Sewanee” was a corruption of “Shawnee,” perhaps in the Mvskoke, Cherokee, Choctaw, or Chickasaw languages.17
But how did the name “Sewanee” become associated with our particular location? The name came from the Sewanee Mining Company (founded 1852), which donated the land to the university, after which the place was referred to as Sewanee. With a coal yard and office in Nashville, the company (headquartered in New York City) chose this name with local appeal, later applied to its landholdings in Franklin and Marion counties. By 1859, university founders acknowledged the region’s Shawnee past, claiming that “Sewanee” was their name for the “table-land” of the Cumberland Plateau, a name which was then “posthumously restored” (misleadingly suggesting the death or “extinction” of the tribe). But “Sewanee” did not become the official name for the town until 1870, when the “University Place” post office name was changed. 19
Later History
Native histories continued to intersect with the university. Bishop J.H. Otey was known by the nickname “Cherokee,” and in 1841 was appointed as Episcopal missionary of Indian Territory before becoming a university founder.20 Edmund Kirby Smith, a Floridian later to become a professor of mathematics at Sewanee, was known by the nickname “Seminole” during his early military career. While a Confederate general, Smith oversaw the Trans-Mississippi Department which included Indian Territory. His recruitment of Cherokees from North Carolina led to the accusation that “Kirby Smith and his minions” had “turned Indian savages loose upon the Unionists of East Tennessee.”21
Sewanee founders had reflected on establishing a university on land where “the Indian hunter in his rambles looked out upon his nation’s home and the burial grounds of his ancestors, soon to be taken by the white man.”22 Early settlers of Sewanee could not ignore the fact that this was Indigenous land. They believed that Rowe’s Spring was “called by the Indians ‘Rattlesnake Spring’,” and claimed to have found rock carvings of rattlesnakes of Native origin, alongside many projectile points (“arrowheads”). Other locals remembered seeing “Indians” in nearby Hawkins Cove in the mid-nineteenth century. Native people reportedly returned to visit sites such as a “sacred” beech grove near Natural Bridge and Lost Cove. A beech tree at Walsh-Ellett Hall was said to have been planted there by a Native American as a gift to the university.23
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Indigenous students and staff became part of the university community. Click here to learn about Henry B. Smith (Cherokee Nation, School of Theology class of 1899), William J. Gardner (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Athletic Director 1914-1915), and John Fredson (Neets’aii Gwich’in, class of 1930).
FOR FURTHER READING
Elizabeth Ellis and Rose Stremlau, “Land Acknowledgments: Helpful, Harmful, Hopeful”
Michael C. Lambert, Elisa Sobo, Valerie Lambert, “Rethinking Land Acknowledgments”
Andrew Denson, Monuments to Absence: Cherokee Removal and the Contest over Southern Memory
Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England
Evan Nooe, Aggression and Sufferings: Settler Violence, Native Resistance, and the Coalescence of the Old South
Footnotes:
1. Speech of John S. Preston in The Tennessean (Nashville), October 31, 1860, Newspapers.com.
2. Smith and Suarez, Sewanee Places, 86-88.
3. Sarah Sherwood and Daniel Fortner, “Early Human Habitation on the Mountain,” in Under the Sun at Sewanee, 103, 105, 111; Smith and Suarez, Sewanee Places, 330; see also Stephen Alvarez photography on Ancient Art Archive.
4. As these overlapping claims suggest, this was a contested borderland between tribal nations. See maps of the cessions on Claudio Saunt’s “Invasion of America”; Gerald L. Smith and Sean T. Suarez, Sewanee Places, 232-233.
5. Allen Gibson file, University Archives; Deed for James Long (Roark’s Cove), 1808, University Archives; see Evan Nooe, Aggression and Sufferings: Settler Violence, Native Resistance, and the Coalescence of the Old South (University of Alabama Press, 2023), 50-51, 134.
6. John Johnson et. al. to John Lowry, January 30, 1813, Records of the Cherokee Agency, M208, NARA.
7. See “Major George Lowry” in The Life and Times of Hon. William P. Ross (Fort Smith: Weldon & Williams, 1893).
8. Art. 3 of Treaty with the Cherokee, 1819; Stuart Marshall, “Eight Killer’s Fiery Gizzard: Cherokee Coalescence Below the South Cumberland Plateau,” Special Issue: Materialities of Unfreedom, Historical Archaeology (forthcoming, 2025).
9. Forage Return (Bell Detachment), October 26-30, 1838, Record Group 217, National Archives and Records Administration.
11. Winchester Home Journal (TN), December 19, 1857, Chronicling America, LOC.
12. Address of the Board of Trustees of the University of the South to the Southern Dioceses (Savannah: George Nichols, 1858), 14, Sewanee University Archives.
13. Etsi odalvi would be closer to “mother mountain.” A proposed connection with the Suwanee River in Florida or Suwanee Creek in Georgia was thought to be a corruption of the “San Juan” River. This may account for the popularity of the name and the standardization of its spelling. Samuel Hinman was eager to prove a definition which “places your institution under the banner of St. John.” Moultrie Guerry, “Makers of Sewanee IV: Charles Todd Quintard,” Sewanee Review 41 no. 3 (1933), 8; John M. Lea to Telfair Hodgson, December 6, 1885, Box 4, Vice Chancellor’s Papers: Telfair Hodgson Collection, University Archives and Special Collections; Samuel D. Hinman to Telfair Hodgson, November 25, 1885, Box 4, Vice Chancellor’s Papers: Telfair Hodgson Collection, University Archives and Special Collections.
14. Samuel D. Hinman wrote this theory—note that Hinman was an Episcopal missionary to the Dakotas, not an expert on the Shawnee language. John M. Lea to Telfair Hodgson, December 6, 1885, Box 4, Vice Chancellor’s Papers: Telfair Hodgson Collection, University Archives and Special Collections; Sewanee Places, 209.
15. Standardization of “Shawnee” as a tribal name developed after other variants including Shawanese/Shawano/Sawanugi/Savanogi/Savannah. Shawnees were known to have occupied the Cumberland River area until around 1700. Stephen Warren, The Worlds the Shawnees Made, 19, 240n20, 105; Ramsey, 78-79; James Mooney, “Myths of the Cherokee,” 499.
16. Nashville Banner, October 28, 1826, Newspapers.com; Nashville Republican, November 15, 1836, Newspapers.com; Gathering Together, 15.
17. J.W. Powell to Samuel D. Hinman, Nov. 14, 1885, Box 4, Vice Chancellor’s Papers: Telfair Hodgson Collection, University Archives and Special Collections.
18. Address of W.G. Dix, 1859, Telfair Hodgson Papers, University of the South Papers Series A, No 1.
19. Sewanee Mining Company Collection, Appalachian State University; Sewanee Places, 308-309; “Sewanee” is still not the official name of the university. Its origins continue to be obscure—as late as 2020, the university claimed the name was “a place known to the Native Americans as Sewanee.” Who are “the” Native Americans?
20. Moultrie Guerry, “Makers of Sewanee: I. James Harvey Otey,” Sewanee Review 1932, 400.
21. E. Kirby Smith to Stand Watie, September 8, 1864[?], University of Texas at Austin; Guerry, Men Who Made Sewanee, 62; Nashville Union (TN), August 26, 1863, Newspapers.com.
22. In this case referring to the proposed site of Lookout Mountain. Athens Post, July 10, 1857, Newspapers.com.
23. Purple Sewanee, 3-4; Sewanee Places, 33; Sandy Gilliam, personal communication.
