Chimney - Last Remnant of Historic Fort Payne - Alabama
N 34° 26.281 W 085° 43.420
16S E 617261 N 3811462
The only remaining evidence of Fort Payne, the starting point for one of the Trail of Tears known as the "John Benge Route".
Waymark Code: WM3N8F
Location: Alabama, United States
Date Posted: 04/23/2008
Views: 30
Fort Payne was the location where Indians were forced to gather prior to their forced removal to Oklahoma. Today, only the chimney remains in woods on private property. Coordinates are for a roadside view where you can see the chimney through the trees to the north.
Information from a Historical Marker in the Town of Fort Payne, AL.
TRAIL OF TEARS JOHN BENGE ROUTE
Fort Payne, Alabama to Oklahoma
The first detachment of 1,103 Cherokees to emigrate under their own officers, prior to leaving for the west held a final council at Rattlesnake Springs (near present-day Charleston, TN) and, by unanimous vote, declared their intentions to continue their old constitution and laws upon arrival in the west. John Benge, an officer of this first detachment was the descendent of red-haired Chief Bench, who had fought for Cherokee freedom in the eighteenth century. Benge’s assistant was George Lowrey, referred to by admiring whites as “the Cherokees’ George Washington.”
John Burnett, a private in Captain McClellan’s company an eyewitness to the Cherokees’ forced removal west by the United States Government, Burnett recalled its horrors:
Side 2
“I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven by bayonet into the stockades” now present-day Fort Payne. On October 3, 1838 Cherokee leader John Benge left Fort Payne, they followed Highway 75 to Albertville, then U.S. Highway 431 to Gunters Landing (now Guntersville).
They were ferried across the Tennessee River, then proceeding north to present-day Gurley before heading northwest along the Flint River, into Tennessee and the west. Many died of hypothermia and starvation at the Three Forks of the Flint River. Over 4,000 Cherokee Indians died on this forced removal known as the Trail of Tears, however many ancestors of American Indians reside in Alabama today.