Davidson's Fort

Davidson's Fort, in what is now McDowell County, North Carolina, was a frontier stockade built in seventeen seventy-six as protection for Scots-Irish settlers pushing into the upper Catawba River valley during the American Revolution. The fort sits near Old Fort, the town that grew from these mountain-gap settlements, at the eastern base of the Blue Ridge. During the Revolution the area was contested between Patriot settlers and Cherokee and Loyalist raiding parties, and the fort served as a muster point and refuge.

It stood near the path that would become one of the main wagon roads west through the mountains, the predecessor of the route that US Seventy and eventually Interstate Forty would follow through the Blue Ridge. The site is commemorated with a historical marker near the modern town of Old Fort.