Lines Were Drawn ᏚᏂᏍᏓᏅᏅᏁᎯ

Less than 2,000 feet from the front door of the East Tennessee History Center, one of the defining events in American history took place during the summer of 1791. On July 2, Territorial Governor William Blount and a number of Cherokee chiefs gathered at the mouth of First Creek and signed the Treaty of Holston — the first formal agreement between the newly Constitutional United States and the Cherokee Nation.

That document drew lines on a map. It also drew lines in law and in memory, many of which have never been erased.

Lines Were Drawn | ᏚᏂᏍᏓᏅᏅᏁᎯ  (Du Ni Sda Nv Nv Ne Hi): The Treaty of Holston and Its Legacy, places visitors at the center of Tennessee’s early history on the 250th Anniversary of the United States.

Lines Were Drawn traces the events that led to the Treaty of Holston from the fall of Fort Loudoun and the British Royal Proclamation of 1763, through the American Revolutionary War, the formation of the Southwest Territory, and on to the decades of Cherokee resilience, removal, and survival that followed. The exhibition draws on historic maps loaned by the Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection, Knox County Public Library, primary source documents from the National Archives, and artwork from the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture and the Tennessee State Museum.

The exhibition also features animated map sequences, engaging video presentations, and five interactive visitor-response stations that invite each visitor to locate themselves within the history.

Importantly, the exhibition does not stop at the treaty itself. Its second major theme is historical memory: how the signing of the Treaty of Holston was recorded, retold, and at times embellished. Visitors move through an arc of secondary sources from John Haywood’s early histories, which became intellectual scaffolding for Indian Removal, to J.G.M. Ramsey’s 1853 Annals of Tennessee, to James W. Wallace’s 1901 painting The Signing of the Holston Treaty, to Raymond Kaskey’s 1998 limestone sculpture at Volunteer Landing. At each turn, visitors are confronted with the same question: how does each retelling of the historic event shape our understanding of the past today?