Tomassee (Cherokee town)

Tomassee (Cherokee: ᏔᎹᏏ, romanized Tamasi; also spelled Tamassee) was a Lower Cherokee settlement located along Tamassee Creek in the Cheohee Valley of present-day Oconee County, South Carolina. The town belonged to the Keowee group of Cherokee Lower Towns, a cluster of settlements situated in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains along the Keowee, Tugaloo, and Chattooga rivers.^[1] Tomassee appears on colonial-era maps and trade records from at least 1721. The site is recorded by the South Carolina Department of Archives and History as site No. 37001.

The name derives from the Cherokee Tamasi. A folk etymology widely repeated in local tourism literature translates the name as "Place of the Sunlight of God," but James Mooney, the principal scholarly authority on Cherokee place names, recorded the word without assigning it a meaning in the Cherokee language.^[1] Variant spellings in colonial documents include Tomassee, Tamassee, and Tomatly.

Tomassee was one of several Lower Towns occupying the upper tributaries of the Savannah River system. The town's location along Tamassee Creek placed it on the western fringe of Cherokee territory, exposed to raids by the neighboring Creek Nation. During the 1740s and early 1750s, sustained Cherokee–Creek warfare destabilized the Lower Towns; several settlements in the Savannah and Chattahoochee river basins were abandoned, relocated, or dissolved amid the fighting and outbreaks of infectious disease.^[2] Tomassee was abandoned around 1752 due to Creek threats.^[3]

The Cherokee victory at the Battle of Taliwa (c. 1755), where war chief Oconostota led 500 warriors against a larger Creek force, broke Creek power in the region and compelled the Creeks to withdraw south of the Chattahoochee River.^[2] Cherokee families gradually returned to the Lower Towns, and by 1770 Tomassee was again inhabited.^[3]

During the Anglo-Cherokee War, British forces under Colonel Archibald Montgomery marched into the South Carolina upcountry in the spring of 1760 with approximately 1,600 troops — regulars from the 1st Royal Regiment of Foot and the 77th (Montgomery's Highlanders), augmented by Carolina rangers and Catawba scouts. Montgomery's column burned the Lower Towns of Estatoe, Keowee, Sugar Town, and others, killing or capturing roughly 100 Cherokee, before relieving the garrison at Fort Prince George.^[4] The extent of damage to Tomassee specifically during this campaign is not documented in detail, though the town lay within the zone of operations. The subsequent peace settlement stripped the Lower Towns of much of their hunting grounds to Carolina settlers.^[4]

On July 1, 1776, Cherokee forces struck settlements along the western frontier of South Carolina, overrunning farmsteads in the Ninety Six and Spartan districts. In response, Colonel Andrew Williamson assembled roughly 1,100 backcountry militia and launched a scorched-earth campaign against the Lower Towns.^[5]

On August 1, 1776, a combined Loyalist and Cherokee force ambushed Williamson's column at Esseneca (Seneca Old Town). In the fighting, Captain Francis Salvador, one of the first Jewish Americans to hold public office, was killed and scalped — the first Jewish patriot to die in the American Revolution.^[5] Lieutenant Colonel LeRoy Hammond led a cavalry counterattack that held the Cherokee long enough for Williamson to regroup, and the arrival of Andrew Pickens with reinforcements turned the engagement.^[5]

Following the action at Esseneca, Williamson's force continued its destruction of the Lower Towns. On August 12, 1776, Captain Andrew Pickens led a detachment of approximately 25 men on a reconnaissance toward Tomassee. As the party crossed an open cornfield near the town, an estimated 185 Cherokee warriors emerged from the surrounding woods and encircled the column.^[6][5]

Pickens ordered his outnumbered force into two concentric rings facing outward. The inner ring reloaded while the outer ring fired, and the two groups alternated volleys — a defensive tactic that gave the engagement its name, the "Ring Fight."^[6] The Cherokee were unable to break the formation and eventually withdrew. Pickens's men buried their fallen in the abandoned town and then set Tomassee ablaze to deny its resources to the Cherokee.^[7]

The Ring Fight marked an early turning point in Andrew Pickens's military career. The Cherokee honored Pickens's stand by calling him Skyagunsta ("Wizard Owl"), a title borne by earlier Cherokee leaders.^[6]

Tomassee was burned a second time later in 1776 during continued operations against Cherokee settlements.^[7]

The destruction of the Lower Towns forced the Cherokee to negotiate. On May 20, 1777, Cherokee delegates and representatives from South Carolina and Georgia signed the Treaty of Dewitt's Corner. The treaty required the Cherokee to cede virtually all of their remaining lands in South Carolina, encompassing what are now Anderson, Greenville, Oconee, and Pickens counties, retaining only a narrow strip along the Oconee Mountain crest.^[8][5] The cession extinguished Cherokee title to the Tomassee site and opened the region to American settlement.

After the war, Andrew Pickens — by then a brigadier general and U.S. congressman — settled near the site of his 1776 engagement. In 1802 he retired to a plantation he named "Tamassee," located roughly 27 miles (43 km) northwest of his earlier Hopewell estate. He built a home known as the "Red House" near the Ring Fight battlefield and lived there until his death on August 11, 1817.^[9]

In 1919, the Daughters of the American Revolution established the Tamassee DAR School in the Cheohee Valley, near the site of the former Cherokee town. The school — one of only two in the United States founded by the DAR — originally served rural Appalachian children and remains in operation as a private nonprofit providing educational and family services. The campus is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.^[10]

A South Carolina historical marker commemorating Tamassee Town stands at the intersection of Tamassee Knob Road (S-37-95) and Cheohee Valley Road (S-37-375) in Oconee County, at approximately 34°52′59″N 83°2′55″W / 34.88306°N 83.04861°W / 34.88306; -83.04861. The marker was erected in 2006 by the Oconee Arts and Historical Commission and the Walhalla Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution.^[11]

The unincorporated community of Tamassee, South Carolina, a census-designated place in northwestern Oconee County, takes its name from the Cherokee town. The community occupies the Cheohee Valley, bordered to the west and north by the Andrew Pickens Ranger District of the Sumter National Forest.^[12]

• Andrew Pickens
• Andrew Williamson (soldier)
• Cherokee–American wars
• Historic Cherokee settlements
• Keowee
• Treaty of Dewitt's Corner

• Hatley, Tom (1993). The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-509638-5.
• Mooney, James (1900). Myths of the Cherokee. 19th Annual Report. Bureau of American Ethnology.
• Edgar, Walter (1998). South Carolina: A History. University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-57003-255-4.