'Toxaway' is an Anglicized form of the Cherokee word for the red bird or cardinal. The first Carolina settlement to bear the name Toxaway was a Cherokee Indian village located a few miles south of the juncture of the Whitewater and Toxaway rivers. Modern estimates place the village of Toxaway under the waters of Lake Keowee not far below the Jocassee dam.(1) Written proof of the existence of the town of Toxaway can be found throughout old South Carolina documents. In fact, the oldest Cherokee treaty on record, made in 1684 between South Carolina and the Cherokees, was signed by five representatives from Toxaway and three from the neighboring town of Keowee.(2)

The Cherokees were happy to supply furs and skins in return for English made goods and it was not long before 'factories' or one-man trading posts were established in Cherokee country. One of these was located at the village of Eastatoe in present Pickens County, South Carolina. Many traders cheated their Indian neighbors and it wasn't long before relations between the two peoples deteriorated, with abuses on both sides. Treaties were made but soon broken, and in time the Cherokees were giving up their land. The settlers needed land and seemed determined to keep pushing back the Cherokee boundaries. There were skirmishes constantly. Finally the situation escalated into an all out war. It was a desperate day in Toxaway in 1760 when the Indians fled for their lives into the forest while Colonel Archibald Montgomery and his troops burned the town, and all the corn in the granaries and in the fields, and then chopped down the orchards, as he had done earlier at Eastatoe and Keowee and two other of their lower towns.

There are no records to indicate whether the town of Toxaway was rebuilt after the siege of 1760-61. Several of the lower towns were rebuilt only to be destroyed again in another conflict. What we do know is that by 1777 the Cherokee had been forced to cede practically all their land in South Carolina plus all of their land lying east of the Blue Ridge. However, they were permitted to continue to occupy the ceded territory in South Carolina.

As the former Indian lands began to be opened for settlement the disheartened Cherokees began to be displaced. A few of them moved up into the Toxaway and French Broad headwaters. Many refuges from the Keowee Toxaway area were eventually settled in northeastern Alabama where they associated with the Chickamauga towns.(3) Others had been assimilated into the Cherokee middle and overhill towns. The few Indians who remained in South Carolina were widely scattered and often lived in out of the way places away from white people.

By the early 1800's white settlers were swarming into the former Indian lands along the Keowee River and into the Eastatoe Valley in Upstate South Carolina. Soon they were fanning out into North Carolina to occupy the terraces along the lower reaches of the Thompson, Whitewater, Horsepasture, and Toxaway rivers. Probably the first white settlement on the North Carolina waters of the Toxaway was at the Canebrake. From there many families moved up the Toxaway into the coves and hollows along its tributaries. These rugged and practical descendants of the Scots Irish gave their community the same name as their river - Toxaway. (For those unfamiliar with the tributaries of the Toxaway River, this area lies southwest of Rosman.) The old Indian trade route known as the Eastatoe Path ran through the eastern part of this white man's Toxaway and crossed the French Broad River at a place called the Eastatoe Ford. Situated at the head of the wide and fertile French Broad valley, it was inevitable that this primitive crossing would develop into a population center in the days to come.

With the permanent settlers who peopled the former Indian sites in the Eastatoe Valley and its outlying gorges came another people - the itinerants - the merchant hunters who ventured into the high mountains hunting game that they sold in the foothills towns. One group of these "Long Hunters" had an outpost in North Carolina known as the Puncheon Camp, located near the upper reaches of the Toxaway River at the base of Hogback Mountain. These men hunted the rugged upcountry while the Cherokees were still living on their former holdings. After the Cherokee Removal in 1839 several of the "Long Hunters" brought their families to the Toxaway basin at Hogback Valley and became permanent residents. Oral tradition in one pioneer family has it that their ancestors purchased an upland valley wherein were found a number of recently abandoned Indian huts or shelters.(4)

About this time, in the 1840's and 1850's, more than ten years before the streets of Brevard were laid out, a fledgling little crossroads at the border of the Toxaway territory was coming into its own. At the head of the French Broad valley at the Eastatoe Ford a school had already been built, and a church. The swamps along the French Broad had been drained and crops were growing in the rich alluvial soils. But the Civil War soon halted progress at the Eastatoe Ford. Several years passed before the ravages of that conflict were healed.

Then came prosperity! It arrived with much fanfare in the year 1900, puffing and blowing and spewing smoke and cinders. J.F. Hays, who owned the railroad, named his depot Toxaway. The people at Eastatoe Ford were so pleased they drew up a charter and incorporated themselves in 1901(5) taking the name of the greater community - Toxaway - as the name of their new town.

Meanwhile, in the high country, Hays and the stockholders of the Toxaway Company had purchased 26,000 acres, including much of the Hogback Valley area settled by the Long Hunters and the Scots Irish from South Carolina. Plans were to build a first class modern hotel to accommodate up to 300 persons, and to impound the headwaters of the Toxaway River, creating an artificial lake with a shore margin of fifteen miles. By late summer 1903 ten more miles of railroad track had been laid, stretching from the town of Toxaway up the mountain to Hogback Valley and the magnificent new hotel at Lake Toxaway.(6)

Two years later, in 1905, the folks at the head of the French Broad valley allowed the General Assembly to change the name of their town from Toxaway to Rosman(7) so as not to be confused with Lake Toxaway. After that the residents of the greater community of Toxaway, the people outside of Rosman on the Toxaway River tributaries who had always called their settlement Toxaway, finally acquiesced and adopted the name Old Toxaway. It was the end of an era.

It was a time to which there was no returning. The days of the pioneers were over; the Long Hunters would come no more; the Indians were gone to a far country. Today, a hundred years later, the memories, even, are not our own, but those of our great grandmothers; all we know is what they told us. Their times are lost to us. We can go to their places. We can visit the piles of their chimney stones, but we can not touch their fire, for it is gone.

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(1) Linda Fulmer, Gene Brooks, Henry Redding; Cherokee Prayer Initiative, Atrocity Site List and Map
(2) Sheila Gibson, Research Time Line
(3) Linda Fulmer, Historical Notes on the Cherokee People
(4) Interview of Jack Owen, descendant of Albert Lee
(5) Transylvania County Historical Society, A History of Estatoe Ford, Jeptha, Toxaway, Eastatoe,....Rosman, N.C.
(6) Jan C. Plemmons, Ticket to Toxaway
(7) Transylvania County Historical Society, op. cit.

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©Marjorie Rose Owen
Little Panthertail Mountain
Lake Toxaway, N.C.

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