Appalachian History Series – The 1838 Cherokee Roundup at Fort Hetzel in Ellijay, Georgia
In 1838, Ellijay stood in one of the most important mountain districts of the old Cherokee Nation in Georgia. The town sat at the meeting of the Ellijay and Cartecay rivers, where the joined waters became the Coosawattee. Long before white settlement made Ellijay the seat of newly created Gilmer County, Cherokee families lived, farmed, traveled, and governed in this country. The area was closely associated with White Path, the influential Cherokee leader whose resistance to removal made Ellijay especially significant to state and federal officials. By the late 1830s, that mountain setting had become one of the places where the United States prepared to turn policy into force.
Ellijay’s geography mattered. Mountain ridges narrowed settlement patterns and limited the number of good roads, but those same roads became vital once removal began. A road already ran along the river valley, and by the spring of 1838 additional connections linked Ellijay to Dahlonega, to North Carolina, and to the Federal Road farther west. In other words, Ellijay was both secluded and connected, a place that could be watched, supplied, and used as a collection point for prisoners. That combination helps explain why federal officers placed one of Georgia’s removal posts there.
Building Fort Hetzel
Fort Hetzel grew out of the rising tension between white settlers and Cherokee residents in Gilmer County. In October 1837, Captain William E. Derrick was ordered into the Ellijay area to establish a military post. At Derrick’s request, Quartermaster Abraham Cox selected the site and named it for Lieutenant A. R. Hetzel. Cox acknowledged that the location, on the Cartecay River about a mile east of the courthouse, was “objectionable in the military point,” but he liked its access to wood, water, and forage. That description, along with later scholarship, places the fort in the East Ellijay area even if the exact spot cannot now be fixed with certainty.
The post was not just a marker on a map. Soldiers and hired laborers built barracks, officers’ quarters, storage buildings, stables, blockhouses, a hospital, and a coal-burning forge. Construction continued into March 1838, when the stockade gate was finally hung. Fort Hetzel was therefore a substantial military installation built for a specific purpose. It was meant to house troops, hold supplies, and eventually confine people. Quartermaster James J. Field’s vouchers show how much labor and material went into that work and how much the army depended on local builders, teamsters, and suppliers to make removal possible.
Field’s records also reveal the fort’s supply network. Flour, rice, ordnance, hospital items, forage, and construction materials poured in through the winter and spring. In late March 1838, Field reported that he had opened a road between Fort Hetzel and Coosawattee Town on the Federal Road in order to shorten the delivery of goods. Sarah H. Hill calls it the only wagon way cut explicitly for Cherokee removal from Georgia. That detail matters because it shows Fort Hetzel was not an improvised local camp. It was tied into a larger military system that linked mountain settlements to the main deportation routes leading out of Georgia.
The Roundup Begins
On May 17, 1838, Major General Winfield Scott issued General Order No. 25, dividing the Cherokee country into military districts and setting the machinery of forced removal in motion. Gilmer County fell within the Eastern District. A report from that same day listed Fort Hetzel as fifty-seven miles from Fort Cass and noted that Derrick commanded one mounted and one infantry company totaling 150 federalized troops. Beginning on May 20, detachments from Fort Hetzel carried or posted Scott’s order through nearby Cherokee communities. Whatever language of restraint appeared in headquarters papers, the system being assembled was one for mass arrest.
Scott’s operational order of May 24 made the fort’s purpose unmistakable. Commanders were instructed first to surround and bring in as many Cherokees nearest their posts as they could secure at once, and then to repeat the operation until they had made as many prisoners as they were able to subsist and send off under escort. Two days later, on May 26, Fort Hetzel’s soldiers began the roundup in earnest. Derrick later reported that he had made prisoners of “425 or perhaps 450” people in two days. His account is one of the clearest surviving descriptions of what happened in the Ellijay country. Soldiers moved quickly, took people in small groups, and struck before families could escape or gather their belongings.
Derrick’s own language shows the suddenness and violence of the operation. He wrote that Cherokees “run in every instance where they have the best opportunity” and explained that his men had taken people in the mountains so quickly that they “could not bring off their property at the same time.” He feared that if his troops slowed down, the news would spread “like litning.” That single phrase captures the logic of the roundup at Fort Hetzel. Speed mattered more than preparation, and control mattered more than mercy. The result was a flood of prisoners brought into the stockade with little more than the clothes they had on.
Prisoners, Property, and Wagons
Fort Hetzel quickly filled. By the first week of June, about five hundred prisoners were camped there waiting for wagons from Fort Cass. Derrick had captured leading men such as Young Duck, Old Hemp, and Kingfisher, and he also reported the mistaken seizure of White Path’s family despite instructions meant to shield the families of certain absent Cherokee leaders. The surviving record is not perfectly consistent on what happened next, but it is clear that their arrest was recognized as an error within the army’s own correspondence.
The problem was not only making prisoners. It was moving them. Derrick admitted he was “at a loss” about how to get his captives to Fort Cass, since wagons had not arrived and the army had done poor planning for property transport. W. J. Worth responded on May 29 and commended Derrick for his “humane effort” to secure Cherokee property, while also urging him to send prisoners forward as early as possible. That exchange exposes one of the most important realities at Fort Hetzel. Even officers trying to preserve household goods were operating inside a system that first separated families from home, then struggled to figure out what to do with their livestock, bedding, tools, and food.
One episode at the fort also reveals how fragile official claims of humane conduct could be. Records show that one of Derrick’s men knocked down a Cherokee woman after she reportedly struck at him with a stick and tried to seize his gun. Derrick said he reproved the soldier, and General Eustis later accepted his explanation. Even so, the incident remains one of the few documented cases in the surviving Fort Hetzel record where the violence of imprisonment surfaces directly in military correspondence. It is a reminder that behind the neat paperwork of removal were frightened people, armed guards, and the daily possibility of abuse.
Missionary Evan Jones, writing in June 1838, described the wider imprisonment phase of Cherokee removal in stark terms, noting that respected Cherokee leaders and their families were being held as prisoners and that many had been given almost no time to gather their possessions. His letter was not written only about Fort Hetzel, but it helps place the Ellijay roundup in its full human context. The people confined at Fort Hetzel were not passing through some neutral administrative process. They were prisoners in a military operation that Jones compared to “the work of war in time of peace.”
From Ellijay to Fort Cass
Fort Hetzel was one of the most active Georgia posts in the 1838 roundup. Hill’s research shows that Derrick ultimately sent 884 Cherokee prisoners from the fort, one of the highest totals recorded from any Georgia removal post. The National Park Service likewise notes that nearly 900 people were rounded up and detained there. From East Ellijay they followed the Coosawattee Road, cut specifically for removal, to the Federal Road and then on toward Fort Cass in Tennessee. In this way, a local mountain fort became one link in the chain that carried Cherokee families from their homes into the stockades and concentration points of the Trail of Tears.
By June 25 Derrick reported that few Cherokees remained in Gilmer County and that local white residents no longer felt apprehension. The pace of the fort slowed quickly after that. Field’s vouchers show routine tasks replacing emergency activity. Men hauled in Cherokee corn, bunks were built for sick soldiers in the hospital, and the post began to empty. On July 12 the remaining quartermaster stores were auctioned off, and within another week the Georgia troops were discharged. Fort Hetzel had done the work it was built to do. It had helped turn a living Cherokee homeland into an emptied landscape.
Why Fort Hetzel Matters
Fort Hetzel matters because it forces the history of Cherokee removal down to the local level. It shows that the Trail of Tears was not only a story of western marches and distant suffering. It also unfolded in Appalachian valleys, at county seats, at river junctions, along newly cut wagon roads, and inside stockades erected by men who drew pay vouchers, bought forage, and filed letters back to headquarters. In Ellijay, removal was immediate and visible. It transformed a mountain community into a place of confinement, supply, and forced transit.
The site’s uncertainty also tells its own story. The documentary trail is strong enough to reconstruct the fort’s founding, buildings, supply lines, roundup, and prisoner totals, yet the exact location remains unresolved and the physical traces have largely been disturbed or erased. That combination of archival clarity and landscape loss is haunting. Fort Hetzel survives most fully now in letters, vouchers, orders, and the memory work of later historians. For Gilmer County and for Appalachian history more broadly, it stands as one of the clearest reminders that the mountains were not outside the history of removal. They were one of the places where it happened.
Sources & Further Reading
Hill, Sarah H. “Cherokee Removal Scenes: Ellijay, Georgia, 1838.” Southern Spaces, August 23, 2012. https://southernspaces.org/2012/cherokee-removal-scenes-ellijay-georgia-1838/
Hill, Sarah H. Cherokee Removal from Georgia. National Park Service and Georgia Department of Natural Resources/Historic Preservation Division, 2005. https://www.nps.gov/trte/learn/historyculture/upload/Cherokee-Removal-from-Georgia-508.pdf
Hill, Sarah H. “‘To Overawe the Indians and Give Confidence to the Whites’: Preparations for the Removal of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 95, no. 4 (2011): 465-497. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23621655
Scott, Winfield. “Major General Winfield Scott’s Order No. 25 Regarding the Removal of Cherokee Indians to the West.” May 17, 1838. Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, Record Group 393, National Archives. https://docsteach.org/document/scott-order-25/
Scott, Winfield. Orders No. 25, Headquarters, Eastern Division, Cherokee Nation. May 17, 1838. Library of Congress broadside. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/rbc/rbpe/rbpe17/rbpe174/1740400a/1740400a.pdf
National Archives. “Records Pertaining to Cherokee Removal, 1836-1839.” https://www.archives.gov/research/native-americans/cherokee-removal
National Archives and Records Administration. The Cherokee Removal (“Trail of Tears”), 1836-1839. Washington, DC: National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/native-americans/reference-reports/cherokee-removal-1836-39.pdf
National Archives and Records Administration. Correspondence of the Eastern Division Pertaining to Cherokee Removal, April-December 1838 (M1475), descriptive pamphlet. https://storage.googleapis.com/nationaltota/2024/12/M1475.pdf
Museum of the Cherokee People. “Re prisoners at Fort Hetzel.” Archive entry for letter from W. M. Derrick to W. J. Worth, May 28, 1838. https://cherokeemuseum.pastperfectonline.com/archive?onlyimages=False&page=343
National Park Service. National Historic Trail Feasibility Study Amendment and Environmental Assessment for Additional Trail Segments, Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. https://parkplanning.nps.gov/document.cfm?documentID=21329
National Park Service. “Feasibility Study – National Historic Trail.” https://www.nps.gov/trte/feasibility-study.htm
Derrick, William E. Letter to Abraham C. Eustis. June 4, 1838. Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, Record Group 393, microfilm M1475, roll 1. Best public discussion link: https://southernspaces.org/2012/cherokee-removal-scenes-ellijay-georgia-1838/
Derrick, William E. Letter to J. H. Simpson. June 25, 1838. Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, Record Group 393, microfilm M1475, roll 1. Best public discussion link: https://southernspaces.org/2012/cherokee-removal-scenes-ellijay-georgia-1838/
Worth, W. J. Letter to William E. Derrick. May 29, 1838. Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, Record Group 393, microfilm M1475, roll 1. Best public discussion link: https://southernspaces.org/2012/cherokee-removal-scenes-ellijay-georgia-1838/
Eustis, Abraham C. Letter to W. J. Worth. June 5, 1838. Records of U.S. Army Continental Commands, Record Group 393, microfilm M1475, roll 1. Best public discussion link: https://southernspaces.org/2012/cherokee-removal-scenes-ellijay-georgia-1838/
Field, James J. Letter to A. R. Hetzel. March 27, 1838. Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Record Group 92. Best public discussion link: https://southernspaces.org/2012/cherokee-removal-scenes-ellijay-georgia-1838/
Author Note: Fort Hetzel is one of those Appalachian places where the paper trail survives more clearly than the landscape itself. I wanted to trace what happened in Ellijay in 1838 as carefully as possible because this history is too important to let fade.