Cumberland Gap National Historical Park

Indigenous peoples

The park’s 2024 historic resource study puts human use of the region at more than 12,000 years, though only ten of nearly 90 sites known in the park by 2005 had prehistoric components. Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Muscogee (Creek) peoples to the south and Shawnee, Wyandotte and Delaware to the north reached hunting grounds on a trail first worn by elk and bison, which the Shawnee called Athiamiowee, the Path of the Armed Ones (the brochure spells it Athawominee). In 1750 Walker saw crosses and figures carved by Indigenous people on laurel trees near the gap. [2] [1]

In the 1774 Treaty of Camp Charlotte the Shawnee gave up their hunting grounds south of the Ohio, and in March 1775 a Cherokee council at Sycamore Shoals, despite opposition, most notably from Dragging Canoe, approved the sale of some 20 million acres. The study describes the wars of 1776–1794 as fighting against colonists who kept violating treaties protecting tribal lands. [2]

Women

The foundation document says modern travelers can hardly imagine what the men, women and children crossing the gap endured: hunger, cold, injury, disease, loneliness and uprooted families. A traveler’s 1803 journal quoted in the park brochure describes four or five hundred people on the road, many nearly naked and barefoot, with a single horse for two or three children. [3] [1]

A century later, on Brush Mountain inside today’s park, the families of the Hensley Settlement lived what the 2024 historic resource study calls a primitive existence reminiscent of the region’s earliest settlers. In December 1903 Eunice “Nicey” Hensley and her husband Sherman became the first of the family to move there; at its peak in the 1930s about 120 people lived in the settlement. According to the 2024 historic resource study, women did most of its domestic labor — preserving food, making quilts and serving as midwives. Sherman Hensley was the last to leave, in 1951. [2]

Black history

The 2024 historic resource study traces Black history in the towns beside the park, Cumberland Gap and Middlesboro. After the Civil War, freed people from the Cumberland Gap area settled at Tiprell, the former home of Confederate Maj. G. B. Cockrell, until his return forced them off the land. Many went back to Cumberland Gap and joined a Black community growing up around the old grist mill; the 1870 census counted 45 Black residents in the town. In industrializing Middlesboro, nearby, there were 447 Black residents at its 1890 charter, and in 1891 Berea College graduate George W. Bell opened the first school there for Black children, later Lincoln High School, where he taught with his wife, Elgetha. Later, the study finds, the region’s Black community declined as industrial jobs moved away and coal mining fell sharply in the 1920s, part of a wider exodus from the Appalachian coalfields to industrial centers such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Akron. [2] [1]

Slavery

The people who crossed the gap, the foundation document notes, ranged from merchants and doctors to servants and enslaved people. Near the gap itself slavery took a different shape than in the lower South, according to the 2024 historic resource study: its small, self-sufficient farms were not heavily dependent on enslaved labor, most small farmers in the region enslaved fewer than five people, and the enslaved typically worked alongside their enslavers as farmers, craftspeople, cattle herders and merchants. A few large landowners — Robert Crockett, Daniel Huff and James Patterson — each held 20 to 30 enslaved people before the Civil War, and the 1850 census listed 33 slaveholders in or near the gap. When John G. Newlee took over the iron furnace at Cumberland Gap in 1841, he brought several enslaved Black workers who were employed in running it. [3] [2]