Six Triple Treat/Threat Town Sites
By Guy Alan Bockmon
In Soil, Its Influence on the History of the United States, A. E. Hulpert noted that the locations of the early
. . . ferries . . . mark the . . . points where the ancient trails descended from high ground to the fords. These were usually located on a river at the mouth of a loading tributary. The sediment of this tributary was deposited blow [sic] its mouth in the main river, making the water shallower at that point and therefore more easily forded. About such fords human habitations usually sprang up in the shape of trading cabins, villages, or forts.It can be argued that Hulpert ignored the fact that travel by water was the mode of preference and that two other important conditions obtained at many such sites: 1) the shoals which eased fording also obliged boaters to portage around or over them, and 2) nearby there were harbors of sorts. Where geology provided that triple treat/threat of ford, portage and harbor, were a source of potable water nearby, there a settlement would likely come to be.
At six such sites there sprang up the first five tiny villages on the Cumberland River and one on the Red.
The village of Nashville grew near the fort sited in 1780 on the defensible bluff made accessible from the river by Lick Branch. The Lick Branch shoal was augmented by that of Pond Branch, which flowed into the Cumberland from the north side.
A little more than a mile downstream from Nashville, and on the opposite side of the river, Heaton's (or Eaton's) Station was also established in 1780, near where Well's Mill Creek loaded into the Cumberland. The station had prospered sufficiently to be called Heatonsburg in the 1783 minutes of the Notables. Putnam believed it was in about 1796 when the town of Waynesborough was laid out at Eaton's Station, a rival to Nashville, and so called in honor of General Anthony Wayne.
Clarksville, the second settlement in Middle Tennessee to survive as a town, was sited on the east bank of the Cumberland, just above the mouth of the Red River. Local historian W. P. Titus observed that Clarksville had the advantages of two rivers, good landings, and, what was then indispensable, a gushing spring of pure water.
A few miles downstream from Clarksville Deason and Weaver Creeks had combined forces over geological time, carving a deep notch into the high limestone bluff. There, on the south shore, downstream from the mouth of the north shore's Hog Branch, the village of Palmyra thrived as the United States' international port closest to the Gulf of Mexico. Jonathan Steele, Comptroller of the Treasury, noted that the appointment of one Morgan Brown as Collector had been approved upon the information of Andrew Jackson, one of the Senators from Tennessee.
About ten miles east of Clarksville, where Sulphur Fork Creek flows into the Red River, the village of Port Royal was laid out, as described by C. E. Brehm, into 37 lots, four streets, a public square and a section of land . . . for a public warehouse.
Upstream from Nashville about six miles is the mouth of Spencer's Spring Branch. It was later to be called, successively, Buchanan's Spring Branch, Craighead's Spring Branch, and Love's Spring Branch. On its banks by 1799 was established the village of Haysborough.
Only a few fords and ferries are still in use--and fewer portages. The cities of Nashville and Clarksville still thrive. Palmyra still exists. The site of Port Royal is now a State Park. The historic villages of Haysborough and Waynesboro have disappeared from modern maps. The triple treat/threat of fording place, portage and harbor at these six sites and at myriad others largely determined where would be settlements, roads, ferries, bridges and, eventually railroads. Thus did sedimentation influence settlement.
