The Indian Boundary Line: Cherokee and Carolina

The line you are near was once one of the most consequential boundaries in the American Southeast. From the end of the Cherokee War in seventeen sixty-one through seventeen seventy-seven, this marked the eastern edge of Cherokee territory and the western edge of the Province of South Carolina. On one side: colonial settlement. On the other: the Cherokee Nation, a confederacy of dozens of towns stretching from here into what is now Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia.

The Cherokee War, which ended in seventeen sixty-one, had been brutal. British forces burned dozens of Cherokee towns, and the resulting treaty imposed this boundary as a hard line neither side was supposed to cross. Settlers crossed it anyway. In seventeen seventy-seven the Treaty of DeWitt's Corner pushed the boundary west again, compressing the Cherokee homeland further as the American Revolution and colonial expansion continued to erode the nation's territory. The present Greenville-Spartanburg county line follows almost exactly the path of that original boundary, a jurisdictional ghost line still visible in modern maps.