what was once Icehouse Bottom. Historical information Although little historical information regarding Icehouse Bottom is available, numerous historical areas later developed within a two-mile (3-km) radius. Fort Loudoun, a frontier fort built in 1756, was located about one mile to the north, and the Tellico Blockhouse, a federal trading outpost built in 1794, was located slightly more than a mile to the northeast. The Overhill Cherokee villages of Tomotley and Toqua were located opposite Rockcrusher Bluff to the south. The Overhill village of Tuskegee, which is best known as the birthplace of the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah, was located almost immediately northwest of the Icehouse Bottom site. In 1819, the Cherokee sold the Overhill territory south of the Little Tennessee River, which included all of what is now Monroe County, to the United States government. Shortly thereafter, an early settler known as "Pioneer" John McGhee purchased several thousand acres along the Little Tennessee River, including the Icehouse Bottom site. He developed some plantations in the area. By the early 1900s, the Icehouse Bottom site was within the boundaries of a tobacco farm owned by John Carson. Carson's family owned the land when the Tennessee Valley Authority began buying property along the river for the creation of the Tellico Reservoir. Although it is unclear how Icehouse Bottom got its name, historian Carson Brewer wrote of a McGhee family story that recalled an "ice-house" located in the 1800s on their lands in the Little Tennessee Valley. According to Brewer, a hole about in circumference would be dug in winter, and ice would be cut from the river or a frozen stream, placed in the hole, and covered with sand. This preserved the ice through the following summer. Archaeological work at Icehouse Bottom In 1967, the Tennessee Valley Authority began construction on Tellico Dam at the mouth of the Little Tennessee; it purchased some along the river's shoreline. That same year, the University of Tennessee Department of Anthropology, under contract with the National Park Service, began a survey of the valley to determine its archaeological resources and to select sites for excavation prior to inundation. Although project members initially were given two years before the dam was expected to become operational, litigation over environmental concerns pushed the dam's operational date to 1979. This allowed for much more extensive archaeological work at the Little Tennessee Valley sites, which was important when their great age became