Little Tennessee River

From Rabun County to Lenoir City

The Little Tennessee begins in Rabun County, Georgia, where, by the North Carolina Gazetteer’s account, Betty and Darnell creeks meet. It flows north past Dillard into Macon County, North Carolina, takes in the Cullasaja at Franklin, and runs on north along the eastern foot of the Nantahala Mountains. Beyond the range it bends northwest and follows the line between Graham and Swain counties, where the Nantahala joins it in Fontana Lake and the river runs along the southern edge of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The Unicoi Mountains rise to the south. It crosses into Tennessee and ends in the Tennessee River at Lenoir City. The Gazetteer records an old belief that de Soto reached it in 1540.

Towns on the river

The Cherokee Middle Towns stood on its floodplain in North Carolina. Nikwasi, under present Franklin, was a town of about a hundred acres around a platform mound dated to about 1000 CE, and Rutherford’s militia burned it on September 10, 1776. Cowee, downstream, came back to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in 2006 and 2007, bought with the land trust for the valley, and Nikwasi’s mound followed, by Wikipedia’s account, in February 2026.

Lower down, in Tennessee, lay the Overhill towns, among them Chota, Tanasi, Citico, Toqua and Chilhowee. Chota, which probably grew out of its neighbour Tanasi, was counted the capital by the middle of the eighteenth century and held 300 to 500 people in about sixty households around an octagonal townhouse. Tanasi gave the state its name. Near them the British built Fort Loudoun in 1756 and 1757 and surrendered it in August 1760.

The dams

Alcoa’s Cheoah Dam was finished in 1919 at 225 feet, then called the highest overflow dam in the world, and Calderwood followed, with its first units running in 1930. Fontana Dam, near the state line, and Chilhowee, in Tennessee, are the others above Tellico. The last dam is TVA’s Tellico, begun on March 7, 1967. On August 12, 1973, a party led by David Etnier found the snail darter at Coytee Springs shoal on the lower river, and the fish became the subject of a fight that reached the Supreme Court in 1978. The gates closed on November 29, 1979, over Chota and Tanasi, after TVA had covered the Chota townhouse site with fill. The Eastern Band now manages the Chota site by agreement. Tellico has no generators and sends much of the river’s flow by canal to Fort Loudoun Dam. In 2025 a paper in Current Biology concluded the snail darter was an eastern population of the stargazing darter.