Cherokee Heartland: The Nacoochee Valley Before Helen
Near Helen, Georgia
Before Helen existed, before the loggers came, before gold drew strangers into these creeks, this was Cherokee country. The Nacoochee Valley takes its name from a Cherokee word meaning evening star. Four ceremonial mounds were built here, and at least one held a townhouse at its peak, a rounded structure where councils met and rituals were performed.
Colonial expedition records from the early seventeen hundreds document Cherokee towns called Nacoochee and Chota in this valley. Standing near the intersection of Georgia Routes Seventeen and Seventy-Five, south of Helen, is the Nacoochee Mound: an earthen platform with a Victorian-era gazebo placed on its summit in the late eighteen hundreds, a strange juxtaposition that has made this one of the most photographed sites in the mountains. Archaeologists have dated human occupation here to as early as one hundred to five hundred of the common era, with later intensive use by Mississippian culture peoples from roughly thirteen fifty to sixteen hundred.
In eighteen thirty-eight, the United States Army removed the Cherokee from Georgia on the forced march that became known as the Trail of Tears. Thousands of people died on the road west. The valley that had been Cherokee heartland for centuries was emptied within a generation, its mounds left behind as the lasting evidence of thousands of years of continuous presence.
