Andrews and Fort Delaney: The Trail of Tears Begins Here

The small town of Andrews sits in the Valley River valley, surrounded by mountains on all sides. It looks like a quiet Appalachian community, and in most ways it is. But this valley was once called Konehetee by the Cherokee, meaning simply the valley, and in the fall of eighteen thirty-seven it became one of the staging grounds for the forced removal of the Cherokee people from their homeland.

In October of eighteen thirty-seven, soldiers from the East Tennessee Mounted Volunteers constructed Fort Delaney in the heart of what is now Andrews. It was built for one purpose: to hold the Cherokee who lived in the upper Valley River valley until they could be marched west. The fort was part of a network of stockades constructed across western North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee as the United States government began the roundup that preceded the Trail of Tears.

By the spring and summer of eighteen thirty-eight, Cherokee men, women, and children from this valley were taken from their homes and brought to the fort. Families were sometimes separated. People died in the stockades from disease before the march even began. The main removal moved west that fall and into the winter of eighteen thirty-eight to eighteen thirty-nine, a journey that killed an estimated four thousand of the roughly sixteen thousand Cherokee who made it. Historians call it Nunna daul Tsuny in Cherokee, usually translated as the trail where they cried.

The community itself went through several names. When a trading post was established in eighteen thirty-seven it was called Jamesville. After the removal it was known as the Whitaker Settlement, named for early settler James Whitaker. It did not take the name Andrews until the railroad arrived in the early eighteen nineties, when it was named for Colonel A.B. Andrews, second vice president of the Richmond and Danville Railroad, which by then controlled the line.

Fort Delaney is gone, but the valley it once occupied remembers what happened here. The mountains held the Cherokee. The forts processed them. The road west took them away.