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The State of Franklin | Highlands History
Written By: Donna Rhodes | Issue: 2020/10 - October
Nathaniel Macon, for whom Macon County was named, was a nonconformist states-rights advocate/legislator who had no use for a strong central government, taxation, and infringement on personal freedoms.
Sound familiar?
While North Carolina’s Piedmont and Coastal regions were handily developed and accessed by a network of roads, the mountains weren’t. Travel was limited to Indian trails, few roads, no rails.
That’s why the region became a political and religious refuge for Scotch-Irish, French, and German settlers who, like Macon, historically cherished wide-open freedom. ‘Twas too hard to hunt them down.
While Western North Carolina was strutting its unconventionality, a section of the territory of Tennessee took things a step further and declared itself the State of Franklin (after Benjamin Franklin), independent of North Carolina, in 1784. The territory stretched between the Blue Ridge and Cumberland Mountains.
Before North Carolina could contest Franklin’s statehood, Franklin’d written its own constitution and elected its own governor, John Sevier, who was immediately declared a traitor by North Carolina. The new state had no banked currency yet, so its legal tender was furs, whiskey, and tobacco, all the things that make surviving a mountain winter in the 1700s almost tolerable.
The state struggled through four winters before it finally gave up. North Carolina took control, pardoned the leaders, and saw to it Sevier was elected to the N.C. Senate.
All forgiven.
In 1796 North Carolina granted land beyond the mountains to the new state of Tennessee and guess who was Tennessee’s first governor?
Yup! John Sevier.
The Highlands area has been a territory defined by many interesting residents, from Cherokee to Spanish explorers, to early pioneers to renegades, and on to moonshiners (Guess where race car drivers perfected their craft?) and, in more recent times, those seeking beautiful, healthy climes.
Who’s next in this ever-evolving land of possibilities? It’s anybody’s guess.
To learn more about Highlands evolution, read Ran Shaffner’s Heart of the Blue Ridge. For additional info, go to highlandshistory.com or email [email protected].
by Donna Rhodes
