Location: US 19 East at Roaring Creek bridge southwest of Frank
County: Avery
Original Date Cast: 1938
Over millennia, Buffalo, elk, deer, and other animals carved trails over the easiest crossing points of the southern Appalachian Mountains. More than fifteen thousand years ago, Native Americans followed these trails as they hunted and moved into new areas. In the 1770’s, Europeans followed the trails over the mountains, first to hunt, later to settle on land reserved for the Native tribes. The path that led over the mountains from the Toe River in North Carolina to the Doe River in Tennessee passed over Yellow Mountain Gap. This trail, originally called Bright’s Trace, was named for an early settler. It later came to be called Yellow Mountain Road. Many of the settlers moving west into the Watauga Settlement along the Watauga River in Tennessee followed this path.
In late 1780, British Maj. Patrick Ferguson led an army of Loyalists to protect the southern British Army’s western flank along the Blue Ridge Mountains. While in western North Carolina, Major Ferguson learned a large force of frontiersmen from over the mountains were rising to support the cause of independence.
Nearly 1,000 “Overmountain Men” gathered at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River in Tennessee on September 25, 1780. They left their farms and families with little more than the clothes on their backs and rifles on their shoulders and marched eastward over the mountains. The men followed Yellow Mountain Road. The second night of their journey, September 27, was spent in a snowstorm at Yellow Mountain Gap, at Bright’s Spring, the head of Roaring Creek.
The army descended the mountain, continuing along Yellow Mountain Road in the rain and snow. The men and horses rested at Quaker Meadows where they were joined by more men from the North Carolina Piedmont. From Quaker Meadows, the force turned south to continue pursuing the Loyalists. Traveling nearly 200 miles in two weeks, the Patriots surrounded and defeated Major Ferguson’s force on October 7, 1780, at the Battle of King’s Mountain.
Major Ferguson’s defeat brought hope to the Revolutionary cause and crushed the Loyalists, paving the way for the eventual British defeat in the South.
Yellow Mountain Gap sits at 4,682 feet in elevation. Today, several trails intersect at the gap. The Appalachian Trail runs along the ridge in a southwest-to-northeast direction. Crossing from north to south, the Overmountain Victory Trail follows Yellow Mountain Road from the Hampton Creek Cove parking area in Tennessee for five miles over the gap and down to Roaring Creek Road on the North Carolina side.
References:
Lyman C. Draper, Kings Mountain and its Heroes (1881)
Henry B. Carrington, Eyewitness Accounts of the American Revolution, 1775-1781 (1877)
Robert Collins, Retracing Bright’s Trace. (June 1975) State - North Carolina Digital Collections
Over Mountain Victory National Trail: http://www.nps.gov/ovvi/