Fort Watauga - Location and Design

Location and Design

19th-century historian J. G. M. Ramsey provided the most often-cited description of Fort Watauga's location in his Annals of Tennessee, published in 1852. Ramsey, who visited Elizabethton and observed what he believed were the fort's remains, placed the fort's location at approximately 0.5 miles (0.80 km) northeast of the mouth of Gap Creek, along what is now West G Street (the site is marked by the 1909 D.A.R. monument). A contemporary of Ramsey, Lyman Draper, placed the fort's location at roughly 1 mile (1.6 km) downstream from the mouth of the Doe River (about 2 miles northeast of Ramsey's location). The 1974 excavations uncovered trench-like formations 300 feet (91 m) west of the D.A.R. marker that state archaeologist Carl Kuttruff believed to be the remains of Fort Watauga. The current reconstructed fort is about 1,500 yards (1,400 m) northeast of Ramsey's location and about a mile west of Draper's.

Little is known of Fort Watauga's original design. Ramsey described the fort as situated on a knoll, and Draper wrote that the fort was surrounded by an open glade within easy firing distance of the north bank of the Watauga River. The 1974 excavations revealed that the fort had an irregular shape, and that it probably consisted of a group of cabins connected by a stockade. The shape of the reconstructed fort was based largely on the formations uncovered in these excavations, and its design was based on contemporary Appalachian frontier forts, which typically consisted of log structures (some with overhanging second stories) and a stockade of sharpened poles surrounding a 1-acre (0.40 ha) courtyard.