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Long Before Road Signs
Written By: Deena Bouknight | Issue: October 2024
Centuries later, we still discover messages from the Cherokee who made this mountain domain their home.
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We look for wildlife, foliage, and fungi while hiking and walking. We might bird watch and listen. The nature artists among us sometimes collect plants for rubbings or rocks for displays.
But who traverses the area’s sundry trails and paths throughout Macon and Jackson counties seeking Cherokee trail marker trees?
Huh? Yes. They still exist.
Like other native people groups in various parts of our country, Western North Carolina’s Cherokee for many years manipulated tree saplings to signify directional meanings – most specifically aspects of early roadways and paths used regularly for trading goods, hunting, and gathering, as well as to make war against opposing tribes or settlers and British forces.
Sighting a tree with unnaturally bent limbs may cause nature enthusiasts to pause and wonder, deducing that the tree somehow just grew that way. And, indeed, some trees do grow in a seemingly deformed way. However, many actual trail marker trees are distinct enough that they can easily be spotted.
The Cherokee would choose a hardwood sapling on a certain part of a path, often near water, at the gap in a mountain, and in areas where roadways and paths intersected, and they would stake the whole sapling or a limb to the ground so that it would grow unnaturally for a while. Then they would un-tether the tree as it matured.
What walkers and hikers might encounter while hiking their own properties, the Appalachian Trail, the Bartram Trail, and various other spots in the region is a tree with a limb protruding straight out and then straight up. Occasionally, there are two trail marker trees side-by-side, such as at the edge of the Cartoogechaye Baptist Church parking lot in Franklin next to Cartoogechaye Creek.
Modern observers often find that determining the meanings of the trail trees is difficult, but common thought is that most were directional, pointing to water sources, river crossings, shelters, etc. Some supposedly also indicated danger, hunting grounds, settlements, and more.
While there is no way to determine if a distorted mature tree is an age-old Cherokee trail marker, it is fun to imagine life in these mountains way before paved roads, automobiles, and manufactured signs.
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