The Cherokee Path (or Keowee path) was the primary route of English and Scots traders from Charleston to Columbia, South Carolina in Colonial America. It was the way they reached Cherokee towns and territories along the upper Keowee River and its tributaries. In its lower section it was known as the Savannah River. They referred to these towns along the Keowee and Tugaloo rivers (in modern Georgia) as the Lower Towns, in contrast to the Middle Towns in Western North Carolina and the Overhill Towns in present-day southeastern Tennessee west of the Appalachian Mountains. History In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Cherokee Path was used by English and Scots traders based in Charles Town. The path was mapped in 1730 by George Hunter, the Surveyor-General of the Province of South Carolina. He noted that it ran from Charlestown to the Congarees, a fort at the confluence of the Saluda and Broad rivers. (This site later was designated as the state capital and named Columbia.) The Path continued across the western frontier to the colonial settlement of Ninety Six, indicated on the map by the number "96". The British constructed Fort Prince George near Cherokee Country. It was a total of from Charlestown to Keowee, the principal Cherokee town of what the colonists called the Lower Towns along the Keowee River and its tributaries (in present-day Oconee, Greenville, Pickens and Anderson counties), which extended into northeastern Georgia. Later colonists developed a wagon road, called the Indian Trail (taken from the Cherokee Trail), that extended to near Orangeburg. In the 20th century, SC 3 was constructed, following much of this path to Monetta, South Carolina before going to Ninety Six. Remnants of both these original pathways are visible in many places to the side of the nearby modern roads that parallel them. From Keowee, one path branched southwest into the Unaka Mountains, usually following the streams and valleys where Cherokee towns were located along the Keowee and Tugaloo rivers, to Clayton, Georgia. The main path continued to the Cherokee Middle Towns along the upper Little Tennessee River and its tributaries, where the later European-American settlements of Franklin and Murphy developed in North Carolina). Traders continued across the Appalachian Mountains to what were known as the Overhill Towns in eastern Tennessee, along the lower Little Tennessee and Tellico rivers. During the French and Indian War, the British built Fort Loudoun, in 1756