Valley Head: Cherokee Telonga and the Winston Place

Local tradition says the Cherokees called this place Telonga and used the grounds of what is now Winston Place as a council meeting site. White settlers began arriving in the early eighteen hundreds, and a small cabin is said to have stood on the site by eighteen thirty-one.

Lawyer and politician William O. Winston enlarged that cabin into a proper antebellum mansion around eighteen thirty-eight. Winston served in the Alabama House of Representatives and invested heavily in the Wills Valley Railroad, which would eventually link Chattanooga to Birmingham and transform these mountain valleys. The mansion, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, has operated as a bed and breakfast and remains one of the best-preserved antebellum homes in northeast Alabama, standing on land that passed from Cherokee governance to American frontier to Civil War history in the span of a single generation.