Old Stone Fort: A Two-Thousand-Year-Old Mystery Near Manchester

Near the town of Manchester, at the confluence of the Duck River and the Little Duck River, there is an earthen enclosure that early European settlers assumed was a fort. They were wrong about almost everything except the walls.

The Old Stone Fort is not a fort and was never used for military defense. It is a ceremonial enclosure built over nearly five centuries by Middle Woodland period Native Americans, beginning around eighty A.D. and completed around five hundred fifty A.D. The builders used earth, stone, and clay to construct walls enclosing about fifty acres on a bluff where two rivers meet and waterfalls drop on three sides. The construction process, radiocarbon dated from charcoal found in the ditches and walls, stretched across generations. This was not a single project but a living institution, added to and modified by communities over more than four hundred years.

The structure is the most complex hilltop enclosure found in the entire American South. Its closest parallels are the great earthworks of the Ohio Valley built by the Hopewell culture, and the Old Stone Fort builders were likely in contact with those communities, part of a trade and ceremonial network that stretched across the eastern half of the continent. The main entrance to the enclosure was designed so that the sun rises directly through it on the morning of the summer solstice, an alignment that was almost certainly intentional and speaks to the site's ceremonial function.

European settlers named it a fort because they could not imagine another reason to build walls. Archaeologists from the University of Tennessee conclusively established its true age and nature in nineteen sixty-six. The site is now Old Stone Fort State Archaeological Park, eight hundred seventy-six acres of riverside woodland with the ancient walls still standing above the falls.