Sequoyah and the Cherokee Overhill Towns

The neighborhood now called Sequoyah Hills takes its name from a man born nearby who accomplished something no other individual in recorded history has matched. Around seventeen seventy, in an Overhill Cherokee town called Tuskegee, a few dozen miles southwest of where you are now, a child came into the world. His mother was Cherokee. His father was believed to be a European trader. He grew up speaking only Cherokee, working as a silversmith and trader, and he could not read or write in any language.

Around eighteen oh nine, Sequoyah became fascinated with what he called the talking leaves. He had watched American soldiers writing letters and receiving information on paper, and he grasped that the marks carried meaning across distance in a way that speech could not. He resolved to create the same capacity for the Cherokee language.

He worked in isolation for approximately twelve years. His first attempt was pictographic, one symbol per word, unworkable at the scale of a full language. He shifted to syllables. By eighteen twenty-one, he had produced a complete syllabary of eighty-six characters, adapted from English, Greek, and Hebrew letterforms that he had seen without understanding. He invented a phonetic writing system for a language he could already speak, without the intermediate step of learning to read.

The Cherokee Nation officially adopted the syllabary in eighteen twenty-five. Within a few years, large numbers of Cherokee people were literate. Within a decade, the Cherokee were publishing a bilingual newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, and maintaining written legal codes and governance documents. A people who had conducted all public life orally for thousands of years had become, in a single generation, one of the most literate nations on the continent.

The Tennessee Valley Authority's Tellico Dam was completed in nineteen seventy-nine, permanently flooding the sites of the Overhill towns, including Tuskegee, where Sequoyah was born. Archaeologists had excavated the sites through the nineteen seventies under TVA contract. Their findings are archived; the sites are under water. The river that drowned them is the Little Tennessee, forty-some miles from this neighborhood that carries Sequoyah's name.