Swannanoa Valley home of Indigenous People

 This photograph is of a model of a Cherokee village ca. 1420 in the Swannanoa Valley. From roughly 1200 to 1500 AD, Natives of the Mississippian culture built a permanent, settled town along the Swannanoa River, where the campus of Warren Wilson College is today. Based on extensive excavations of the site performed by archaeologists and our knowledge of the ways of life of the Cherokee in later centuries, we can imagine what the lives of men and women in the community might have looked like in the early 1400s.

The people in this community would never have met Westerners, but their descendants in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries would encounter Spanish and Anglo-American colonizers.

In the late 1700s, white settlers used the outbreak of the Revolutionary War as an excuse to invade and colonize the Swannanoa Valley and much of the Cherokee territory west of the Blue Ridge. In the fall of 1776, General Griffith Rutherford and 1,700 men entered the Swannanoa Gap and proceeded southwest in an extended raid against the Cherokee that would be remembered as Rutherford’s Expedition. By the end of the expedition, dozens of Cherokee towns were burned to the ground and hundreds of acres of corn crops destroyed, leading to the starvation and death of many Cherokee. By the end of the Revolution, white settlers began to arrive and claim land in the Swannanoa Valley.