Overmountain Victory Trail: The March That Changed the War

In the late summer of seventeen eighty, the American Revolution was losing in the South. Charleston had fallen. The main Continental Army in the region had surrendered. And British Major Patrick Ferguson, commanding Loyalist militia forces in the western Carolinas, sent a message over the Appalachian Mountains to the frontier settlements: lay down your arms, or he would march his army over the mountains, hang your leaders, and lay waste to your country with fire and sword.

The message had the opposite of its intended effect.

On September twenty-fifth, seventeen eighty, over a thousand militiamen gathered at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River in what is now Elizabethton, Tennessee. They came from southwest Virginia, from eastern Tennessee, from the Yadkin River valley in North Carolina, men who lived west of the mountains and called themselves Overmountain Men. They were not Continental soldiers. They were farmers, hunters, and woodsmen who supplied their own weapons, their own horses, and their own food, and they answered to commanders they had elected themselves.

They marched east over the Blue Ridge, covering difficult terrain in an autumn that was already turning cold. Twelve days after mustering at Sycamore Shoals, they caught Ferguson and his force of roughly a thousand men atop a narrow ridge called Kings Mountain, just inside the South Carolina line. The battle on October seventh lasted about an hour. Ferguson was shot dead. His entire force was killed, wounded, or captured. The Patriot militia lost fewer than thirty men.

Kings Mountain broke Britain's western strategy. It exposed Cornwallis's flank and forced him to abandon his push into North Carolina. It began the chain of Patriot victories, Cowpens in January, Guilford Courthouse in March, ultimately Yorktown in October of seventeen eighty-one, that ended the war.

The Overmountain Victory National Historic Trail, designated by Congress in nineteen eighty as the first National Historic Trail east of the Mississippi, traces the three-hundred-thirty-mile march route through Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina. It can be walked, ridden, or driven.