Holston Valley

The Holston comes into this valley as two rivers. The North Fork and the South Fork meet at Kingsport, and from there the main stem runs 136 miles southwest down the Great Valley to Knoxville, where it joins the French Broad and the Tennessee River begins. Cherokee Dam, near Jefferson City, backs the main stem up into Cherokee Lake. The South Fork and its tributary the Watauga carry a chain of dams of their own: South Holston, Boone, Fort Patrick Henry, Watauga and Wilbur.

The valley’s most storied ground is an island. Long Island, in the river at Kingsport, was Cherokee land for thousands of years, a sacred place for councils and treaties, and neutral ground halfway along the Great Indian Warrior Path. In 1775 Daniel Boone started cutting the Wilderness Road from it toward Cumberland Gap. The 1777 Treaty of Long Island confirmed that the Cherokee still owned it, and they gave it up in 1806. The island was named a National Historic Landmark in 1960, and on July 16, 1976, the city of Kingsport returned 3.61 acres of it to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

The river has carried other things. On Christmas Eve, 1924, the waste dam at the Mathieson Alkali works in Saltville, Virginia, broke into the North Fork and killed nineteen people who lived along the river. The North Fork stayed polluted and close to lifeless for decades, and fish caught below Saltville still come with a warning not to eat them, for mercury.