FORMING RED CLAY: THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE HISTORY OF RED CLAY STATE HISTORIC PARK

Abstract

Red Clay State Historic Park preserves and commemorates the last capital of the Cherokee Nation prior to removal, the Red Clay Council Ground. Since the forced removal, the land has ever since been contested ground. Whites quickly acquired it and turned what had been a Native American landscape into a landscape defined by property lines, deeds, and legal filings. Generations of whites, some dependent on enslaved labor, transformed the Council Ground into agricultural fields, soon boosted by the arrival of the railroad along the eastern border in the late nineteenth-century. Historians, archaeologists, Cherokees, and government officials combined efforts in the 1970s to reclaim some of the Council Ground for a state park, which it became in 1979. Red Clay became a place of symbolic reconciliation between the scattered nations of the Cherokees. Yet even that transformation into a Cherokee commemorative property was contested by Muskogee Creeks—because here too were Creek Indians before removal, and their story is scarcely acknowledged or told. Thus, this public history dissertation aims to identify and peel back the layers of history at Red Clay by taking the approach of a cultural landscape story. Red Clay is many things to many people, and the stories are just as rich. Understanding those layers of history and addressing the existing silences in public interpretation reveals an active, continuous cultural landscape.