The St. Elmo Historic District, or St. Elmo for short, is a neighborhood in the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. It is situated in the southernmost part of Hamilton County within the valley of Lookout Mountain below the part of the Tennessee River known as Moccasin Bend. St Elmo is at the crossroads of two ancient Indian trails, and was first occupied by Native American hunters and gatherers in the Woodland period, then agricultural Mississippians, including Euchee and Muscogee, and for a brief period between 1776 and 1786, the Cherokees in a community called Lookout Town. St. Elmo became part of the city of Chattanooga when it was annexed in September 1929. Hundreds of properties in the neighborhood were listed on the National Register in 1982, and in 1996 St. Elmo was designated a Local Historic District. Many of the buildings from the late 19th and early 20th century have been preserved. A St. Elmo resident is an 'Elmoian'. Settlement In 1776, Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe and several hundred Cherokee warriors migrated to Chickamauga Creek after objecting to a treaty between other Cherokees and American land speculators and promising active resistance. They became known as the Chickamaugas, and eventually moved farther down the Tennessee River below The Suck; to the other end of the Tennessee River Gorge. There they built the "Five Lower Towns" at Running Water (now Whiteside) and further downriver. Between 1777 and 1782, the so-called "Chickamaugas" also had a town called Tsatanugi (or Chatanuga, based on the Muscogee word cvto - rock), near here along Chattanooga Creek. Daniel Ross, a young Scottish immigrant, came to the area in 1785 and worked at a trading post with John McDonald, the area's first businessman. Ross married McDonald's daughter and the two built a house in what was to become St. Elmo after the Wars. Their youngest son, John Ross, was the leader of the Cherokee Nation who would call for passive resistance to the federal Indian removal policies that led to the Trail of Tears in 1838. Early St. Elmo and Chattanooga Up until 1838, the Tennessee River was the dividing line between Hamilton County and the Cherokee country. That year, the community of Ross's Landing was surveyed, and in 1839 the village of Chattanooga was established north of the mouth of Chattanooga Creek. In 1840, the state of Tennessee began to sell the property formerly owned by the Cherokees