The southern border of Tennessee was declared to be located on the 35th parallel north when Tennessee was established as a state by Congress on June 1, 1796. This would have allowed a small portion of the river to be located within Georgia. Georgia, one of the original Thirteen Colonies, had become a state on January 2, 1788, but did not sell its western territory to the Federal government until 1802, when the selling agreement declared Georgia's western border to be a line from the great bend of the Chattahoochee River and thence in a direct line [north] to Nickajack [a Cherokee Indian settlement] on the Tennessee River... running up the said Tennessee River and along the Western Bank thereof to the Southern Boundary line of the State of Tennessee. The land that Nickajack was located on is now part of Nickajack Lake, a reservoir created by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The boundary between Tennessee and Georgia, however, was not surveyed until after the Alabama Territory was created on December 10, 1817. Shortly thereafter both Tennessee and Georgia's legislatures agreed to conduct a survey of their border. Georgia appointed mathematician and University of Georgia professor James Camak as part of the surveying team. The survey took place in 1818, and both teams incorrectly determined the 35th parallel north to be south of its actual location. Tennessee's 1819 code describes Nickajack as being located one mile and twenty-eight poles due south from the south bank of the Tennessee River as found by mathematician James Camak. The actual 35th parallel north crosses the Tennessee River near present-day Haletown, Tennessee. The equipment the surveyors used was also reportedly outdated, and one of the Georgia surveyors reportedly requested that the governor provide them with more modern equipment. The two teams started at Georgia's northwestern corner and continued eastward placing a marker where they believed the tripoint of Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina was located, and stopped near Hightower Bald in the Blue Ridge Mountains, approximately west of the northeastern corner of Georgia. This survey was later ratified by Tennessee's legislature, but not Georgia's. In 1819, the Georgia legislature asked the North Carolina legislature to appoint a surveying team to meet with their team and survey the rest of the boundary. The teams met at Ellicott's Rock, located along the Chattooga River, which was constructed by astronomer and surveyor Andrew Ellicott in 1811, marking what he determined to be the tripoint of Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and continued westward until they reached the location where the Georgia and Tennessee teams had stopped surveying the boundary the year before. At this point, the termination of the line surveyed the year before was about north. Instead of attempting to correct the mistake from the year before, the teams instead marked a line directly southward to connect the two lines, an offset that came to be known as Montgomery's Corner after Hugh Montgomery, one of the surveyors on the Georgia team.