Before Benton Began

(Reprinted from 1937 edition of Polk County News)

by J.D. Clemmer

Two or three years before Benton, Tenn. was named or located, a log cabin in the Cherokee Nation stood on the West side of the Federal Road (near West corner of present Courthouse yard). The road was then two years old here, having been completed from Columbus on the Hiwassee to Hilderbrands on the Ocoee in 1814. Across the road was a log barn, and both were in the woods. In the cabin yard (in the Court yard) a child named Howell was buried, and its grave is still there but unlocated. (Pioneers buried their dead in their yards.)

In 1837 a white man named Linder and his Cherokee wife lived in this cabin, and kept the Stand, or public stopping place here, four miles from Columbus, and the wagoners called it the Four Mile camping place, and the four mile branch, there being no water on the road back to Columbus except the Hiwassee river, upon the North bank of which Columbus had been built above high water in 1820. For centuries before that the War Path crossed the river there, and passed a mile northwest of the Four Mile Stand (being marked by the Cleveland D.A.R. and also by two signs by the Benton Historical Association in Esq. Jimmy Taylor’s weeds where an Indian trail crossed it).

This Indian trail crossed the War Path near Four Mile branch and was crossed by the Federal road at Linders. This trail was crossed in 1807 by the Treaty Mail route from Knoxville to New Orleans, also where the road later crossed the trail, the trail, the Federal Road and the treaty mail route all passing through or near the same place (the present Courthouse yard).

In Sept. 1837, James McKamy moved his family from Blount County and bought Linder’s occupancy claim. While waiting for Linder to move, McKamy and his family camped and lived in a hunters bark camp half mile down the branch (where the Slave Cabin of 1831-8 stands now). McKamy's land went a mile up and down the branch and had a dozen good springs on it (of which five are now covered with washed in soil, with two of them used as wells with pumping outfits on them).

A mile upstream lived the white family of Campbells (on the present Campbell farm.) and near by at Mink Spring, lived the Indian family named Mink. The other nearest neighbors were William Biggs, Abraham Lillard, Sr. and Robert Hood, all from three to five miles away, and all settling there in 1835. Beaver Toter lived a mile southwest on Summy branch. No others lived within a mile of McKamy's.

In 1837, the white settlers between the two rivers and Chllhowee mountains organized a Baptist Church half mile above Linders, or McKamy's. In its log house, J.W. Shelton taught a Bradley County school for such of the early settlers whose children could walk to it.

Among his students was six year old Mary McKamy, and from her Mrs. Mary (McKamy) Stewart in her old age a letter was received stating most of these facts and many more. (McKamy moved to Cleveland. Also Stewarts and their descendants live there now, in part, others elsewhere, none in Polk).

Across Ocoee River near the Treaty Mail route crossing (at the Polk Crewse place, near Reynolds ford, bridge, and two islands) was the Amohee Baptist Church of Indian worshipers. Friendship Baptist Church in the southeast comer of McMinn county was then 11 years old, and there were both Baptist and Presbyterian churches in Columbus.

So in 1837, the McKamys attended church and school along with other earliest settlers between the rivers at Four Mile, or Ocoee Baptist Church, in the Fifth District of Bradley County (now the 2nd precinct of Polk), and they got mail once or twice a month from the horseback courier passing along the Treaty Mail Route, went to the Jack Bean mill on Norton branch for meal, and to Columbus for store goods, kept the Stand for travelers along the Federal Road as well as from the nearby War Path, along which President Monroe and Col. Andrew Jackson toured from Chattanooga to Knoxville. after having crossed State South of Tennessee.