Tate's Fort
Tate's Fort on Moccasin Creek in Russell County was another the early
historians completely overlooked, and only two historical references brought
it to light. The first made by Mrs. Samuel Scott of Jessamine County,
Kentucky, who in referring to her stay on the Clinch makes this statement:
"We moved out of Tate's Fort, close on Moccasin Creek, over to Holston
to get ready to come to Kentucky." (15) That was in the spring of 1780 and
she joined a party of emigrants to Kentucky in 1784.
The other statement was made by Captain John Carr, of Sumner County,
Tennessee, who was born on Carr's Creek in Russell County, Virginia, in
1773, and moved with his widowed mother to the Cumberland settlement in
1784. In speaking of the year 1776, he states:
"My father settled on Big Moccasin Creek with some 15 or 20 families
from Houston's Fort. The Indians were so troublesome that we built a "new
fort." It was called Tate's Fort, where we forted in summer and returned
home in winter." (16)
Carr's statement needs some clarification and he does not mean that his
father settled on Moccasin Creek in 1776, but that it was this year in which
they moved out of Houston's Fort where they had refugeed in the past and
built a new fort for their convenience. His father had settled on Moccasin
Creek much earlier for John, himself, was born there in 1773, and his father
died there in 1782. This, then, places the construction of Tate's Fort in
the year 1776.
That Tate's Fort was a stockaded affair certainly cannot be doubted, for
15 or 20 families could never have crowded into a fort house. It certainly
must have been manned and defended by its occupants for I find no record of
militia ever having been stationed there.
This fort was built on the lands of Colonel John Tate who had settled on
Moccasin Creek in the year 1772, on a tract of 174 acres of land surveyed
for him December 13, 1774. (17) I have not found any account that this fort
was ever attacked directly by Indians
In 1777, Robert Dale settled on a tract of land on Big Cedar Creek in
Glade Hollow and obtained a patent warrant for the same. This may be the
land upon which the fort stood and which James Smith was residing at an
earlier date. John Carr, who was born on Carr's Creek in 1773 refers Dale's
Fort on the Clinch, which was surely a reference to the Glade Hollow Fort.
(8)
Tradition says that after the cessation of Indian hostilities the old
Glade Hollow Fort was converted into a church known as the Glade Hollow
church. That a church did exist here is shown in Semple's "Baptist in
Virginia", Table of Holston Baptist Association, page 358, which reads: "The
Glade Hollow Church was planted by T. Burgess and S. Goodwin in 1788."