Haywood County: Cold Mountain and the Cherokee Homeland

Haywood County occupies the far western corner of North Carolina where the Great Smoky Mountains and the Pisgah National Forest together cover nearly forty percent of the land. It is some of the most rugged terrain in the eastern United States, and the history of the people who have lived here follows the shape of the mountains.

For centuries, the Southern Highlands were Cherokee country. The Kituhwa townsite in neighboring Swain County was considered the mother town of the Cherokee people. Haywood County's own mountains and river valleys were hunting grounds, trade corridors, and home to numerous Cherokee villages. The smallpox epidemic of seventeen fifteen devastated the population. A series of wars and treaties through the late seventeen hundreds pushed the Cherokee westward. Then came the Trail of Tears in eighteen thirty-eight, when the federal government forcibly removed roughly fifteen thousand Cherokee people from their homelands in the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Georgia. A small number evaded removal and eventually formed the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, whose reservation sits just south of Haywood County at Cherokee.

European settlers began arriving in Haywood County after the Revolution. General Griffith Rutherford had led a campaign against Cherokee towns in the mountains in seventeen seventy-six, and some of his soldiers returned afterward to claim land. The county was formally established in eighteen oh eight, named for John Haywood, the state treasurer. The county seat, first called Mount Pleasant, was renamed Waynesville in eighteen eleven.

A mountain in the western part of the county, rising to six thousand and thirty feet, is called Cold Mountain. It gave the Haywood County native Charles Frazier the title for his nineteen ninety-seven novel about a Confederate deserter walking home across the Southern Appalachians at the end of the Civil War. Frazier based the story on family oral history about a real ancestor from Haywood County. The novel won the National Book Award and made Cold Mountain itself a literary destination.

The mountain was always there. The Cherokee named it first.