Cherokee Ground, Unionist Country, A Family Passing Through
In the river country where Bradley and McMinn counties meet, the Fosters arrived just after the removal and left before the Civil War made leaving harder
Bradley County was carved in 1836 from the Ocoee District — the last large block of Cherokee territory in Tennessee — and the families who came into it arrived in a landscape still visibly shaped by the people who had just been forced out: clearings already made, orchards already planted, a civilization interrupted. The Foster family was among those who settled here in the late 1830s, farming Candies Creek country between the Hiwassee and the Ocoee before the next westward pull took them to Missouri.
A River Country With Family on Both Sides
The country where Bradley and McMinn counties meet is defined by rivers — the Hiwassee sliding in from the east, the Ocoee rushing out of the mountains to the south, the Tennessee itself rolling westward just beyond the ridge. It is country where the rivers were the roads, where families on one bank and families on the other were connected by ferries that mattered in a very particular way: the ferry at Blythe's crossing, the ferry at Walker's on the Hiwassee, the wooden boats that pulled families and wagons and livestock from one side of the water to the other through seasons of flood and drought and everything in between. To have family on both sides of a river, in this country, was to have family in different worlds when the water rose — and to live, always, with the ferry in mind.
McMinn County was organized in 1819, carved from lands that had until recently been Cherokee territory under the terms of a series of treaties that each generation of American expansion had found insufficient and renegotiated. The county was named for Joseph McMinn, a governor of Tennessee who had served as a Cherokee agent — an irony that would not have been lost on the Cherokee, for whom the agents of the United States were rarely allies. Bradley County came later, in 1836, created from the Ocoee District, which had itself been carved from the last large block of Cherokee territory in Tennessee. The names on the county maps were new. The ground underneath them had been Cherokee ground for generations beyond counting.
The Cherokee Removal, 1836–38
When Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the fate of the Cherokee in this corner of Tennessee was, in practical terms, decided. The political and legal struggle that followed — the Cherokee taking their case to the Supreme Court, winning in Worcester v. Georgia and finding that the Jackson administration simply ignored the ruling — played out over nearly a decade while the settlers who had been moving into the ceded lands continued arriving and the tension between what the law said and what was actually happening became impossible to sustain.
Red Clay, just across the line in Bradley County, became the last seat of Cherokee government in Tennessee in the years before the removal — a place where the tribal council met in the open air, since Georgia had made it illegal for the Cherokee to assemble within that state's boundaries. Men came from across the nation to deliberate, to appeal, to argue against what was coming. The deliberations did not stop what was coming. In the spring of 1838 the U.S. Army arrived to begin the collection of Cherokee families into stockades, and by the autumn the detachments were moving — through Bradley County, across the Tennessee River at Blythe's Ferry, northwest toward a territory they had never seen. An estimated 10,000 Cherokee crossed at Blythe's Ferry between September and November of 1838. That work fell to Captain John Elliott's Company of Tennessee Volunteers, the men who managed the crossing day after day through the autumn months while the detachments came through. Thousands would die on the road west. The Cherokee called it Nunna daul Tsuny — the Trail Where They Cried.
The settlers who moved into the vacated territory included families from East Tennessee who had been watching the Cherokee lands with the particular attention of people who knew that good bottomland was finite. The Foster family — Frederick and Jarrett and their related households, among whom Andrew Jackson Foster was born in McMinn County around 1842 — was among those who arrived in this window, in the years immediately after the removal opened the Ocoee District to settlement. They came into a landscape still visibly shaped by the people who had just been forced out: clearings already made, orchard trees already planted, the evidence of a civilization interrupted rather than absent. That the settlers knew this, on some level, is certain. What they made of it is harder to recover.
The Candies Creek Country
Between the Hiwassee and the Ocoee, in the rolling terrain of Bradley County, runs Candy's Creek — Candies Creek in the older spelling — a tributary that gave its name to a district and a community and a church that served the families who farmed its bottomlands. It was an address with meaning in the mid-nineteenth century southeastern Tennessee: close enough to the new county seat of Cleveland to be part of a functioning civic world, far enough from the main roads to be left largely to itself. The families in the Candies Creek region farmed mixed crops, kept livestock on the hills above the bottoms, and maintained the kinds of extended neighbourhood networks — kinship, church membership, mutual aid — that the upcountry South required for survival.
It was the kind of country that made it easy to understand why a family arriving from South Carolina in the 1830s would settle there. The terrain resembled what they had left — rolling, wooded, cut through by streams, demanding but not impossible — and the community structure, anchored by the Baptist and Methodist churches that spread through the region in the early nineteenth century, offered a familiar social framework. The Cherokee removal had cleared the land; the evangelical revivals of the period filled it with the institutions that gave communities their shape.
The War That Divided the Valley
Tennessee left the Union reluctantly. The state's eastern counties — mountainous, economically distinct from the plantation world of Middle and West Tennessee, with fewer enslaved people and stronger ties by commerce and culture to the upper South — voted overwhelmingly to remain in the Union even after the state as a whole voted to secede. Bradley County, in the 1861 referendum on separation, voted 1,382 to 507 to stay. The majority did not want this war. It came anyway.
What followed was among the most painful experiences of any Southern Unionist community during the conflict. Confederate conscription reached into the Tennessee valleys and demanded men who had not agreed to the cause. Those who refused were imprisoned. Those who could escape did — an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 men from East Tennessee crossed the Cumberland Mountains into Kentucky to join the Union Army rather than serve under the Confederate flag. Their families, left behind, were sometimes sheltered by women who brought food to the men hiding in the hills; sometimes they were left to manage alone while husbands and sons were in prison or in Kentucky or in an army they hadn't chosen.
The armies arrived in 1863. Chattanooga, twelve miles south of Bradley County's northern border, became one of the war's pivotal contests — the Union siege, the Confederate positions on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, Grant's relief of the besieged garrison in the autumn of 1863. The road through Bradley and McMinn counties ran toward all of it. Union and Confederate forces moved through the region in alternating waves, foraging from the same farms, occupying the same towns, leaving the civilian population to navigate a violence that came from both directions and respected neither loyalist sentiment nor family history. Chickamauga Creek, just south of Chattanooga, gave its name to one of the bloodiest battles of the entire war — nearly 35,000 casualties over two days in September 1863 — fought within earshot of the farms of Bradley County.
For the Unionist families who had tried to stay neutral, or who had sent sons to Kentucky to join the Federal forces, the Confederate occupation of their valley was a particular ordeal. Some crossed into Kentucky themselves, becoming refugees in a war they had not wanted, supported by Union relief efforts that were inadequate to the scale of the need. Others stayed and endured, waiting for the Federal armies to arrive and make the occupation end. Among those who made the harder choice were men from this very county: Danis Foster, eldest son of Jarrett Foster, and Andrew Hooper, who had married Jarrett's daughter, both found their way into the 8th Tennessee Infantry, U.S. Army — the regiment organized at Camp Dick Robinson and Camp Nelson in Kentucky, drawing in the East Tennessee men who had crossed the mountains to fight for the Union rather than against it. A South Carolina-born man fighting for the Federal government, at the age of forty-three, in a Tennessee valley that had sent most of its sons the other direction: that was Danis Foster's Civil War.
What the Country Looks Like Now
Bradley County's county seat is Cleveland, a city of around 50,000 on the edge of the Cherokee National Forest, where the Ocoee River comes down out of the mountains and the Appalachian ridges begin their rise to the northeast. McMinn County, with its county seat at Athens, sits just to the north and west — a town perhaps best known, to students of American political history, for the 1946 Battle of Athens, when returning World War II veterans took up arms to overthrow a corrupt local political machine, a story that carries its own complicated echoes of the Unionist tradition the county never entirely lost.
The rivers are still there. The Hiwassee runs through McMinn County and into the Tennessee, its corridor now managed for recreation as much as agriculture, its banks popular with trout fishermen and kayakers. The Cherokee National Forest covers the high ground to the east. Blythe's Ferry, where ten thousand Cherokee crossed the Tennessee River in the autumn of 1838 on their way west, is now a Tennessee state historical park, its original purpose commemorated by a marker at the water's edge and by the descendants of those who crossed it, who have not forgotten.
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