of the peninsula. A small commercial center, known as Council Point, is concentrated around the intersection of Kenesaw and Keowee avenues. History Early history What is now Sequoyah Hills was inhabited by Native Americans as early as the Late Woodland period (c. 500–1100 A.D.), as indicated by a 1,000-year-old Indian mound that rises in the median of Cherokee Boulevard. By the 18th century, the area was under control of the Cherokee, whose Overhill towns lay along the Little Tennessee River to the southwest. The neighborhood's namesake, Sequoyah, was born in the Overhill town of Tuskegee around 1767. In 1796, Moses Looney (1750–1817), who had served in various capacities with the failed State of Franklin during the 1780s, acquired a tract of land in what is now Sequoyah Hills. He and his descendants would remain on this land for several decades, and the area became known as "Looney's Bend." Other early landowners in the Sequoyah Hills area included future Knoxville mayor James Park, who purchased a tract in 1804, William Lyon, who built a house and mill near the modern intersection of Lyon's View Pike and Northshore Drive around 1810, and Drury Armstrong (builder of Crescent Bend), who acquired a large tract of land west of modern Scenic Drive in 1846. The oldest house still extant in Sequoyah Hills, which currently stands at 715 Scenic Drive, was originally built in the 1850s as a tenant house on the farm of Allen Johnson (1808–1898). Around 1814, George White, son-in-law of James Park and grandson of Knoxville founder James White, built a house along what is now Woodhill Place. While this house is no longer standing, foundation remnants of a barn that accompanied the house can be seen along Scenic Drive. Early development In 1890, Francis Huger, superintendent of the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railway, acquired over in Sequoyah Hills with the intent of moving a steel mill to the area. The Panic of 1893 doomed this venture, however, and the land was distributed to Huger's creditors in 1908. Knox County road commissioner Peter Blow (1854–1945) built a house on the south bank of the river opposite Sequoyah Hills in 1910, where he operated a ferry. Blow's Ferry Road, which connected the ferry to Kingston Pike, is believed to have been built along a trail that once accessed a cemetery containing the graves of Civil War soldiers and slaves. In 1907, several