Appalachian Folklore & Myths
A Stone Wall Above the Clouds
High on a ridge in north Georgia, just above the modern trails and campsites of Fort Mountain State Park, a low stone wall winds along the crest. It zigzags for roughly eight to nine hundred feet, rises only a few feet above the soil, and ties itself to boulders and outcrops as it goes. Archaeologists and park staff generally describe it as a prehistoric Native American construction, probably raised sometime between 500 and 1500 CE, long before written records for the southern Appalachians.
No one can say with confidence why it was built. The National Register of Historic Places nomination calls it more of a marker that separates one end of the summit from the other rather than a fortress. Archaeologist Philip E. Smith, who surveyed it in the 1950s, grouped it with other Indigenous stone enclosures in the southern Piedmont and concluded that the wall represents a prehistoric aboriginal construction whose exact purpose is still uncertain.
Local imagination has never been satisfied with uncertainty. Guides, plaques, and newspaper features have credited the wall to Hernando de Soto, mysterious Welsh explorers, or a vanished people who saw better by moonlight than in the day. That last tradition, tied to a group known as the Moon Eyed People, has become the most enduring story attached to Fort Mountain. To understand how that happened, we have to start not on the ridge itself, but in an eighteenth century Philadelphia study.
Barton, Marbury, and the First Printed Moon Eyed People
The earliest known printed reference to the Moon Eyed People appears in 1797, in a book with a long title: New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America by physician and naturalist Benjamin Smith Barton. Barton never claimed that he had heard the story directly from Cherokee elders. Instead he cited Colonel Leonard Marbury, a Revolutionary War officer and Indian agent in Georgia, who reported what the Cherokee supposedly told him.
Barton wrote that the “Cheerake” said when they first came to their country they found it possessed by “moon eyed people who could not see in the daytime,” whom they drove out. In other words, the story already described a displacement. A new people arriving in the southern highlands found an older group there and expelled them. That is the core of the legend.
From there Barton began to speculate. He suggested that the Moon Eyed People might have been an albino race and linked them to a very different account from the tropics. In a late seventeenth century travel narrative, Welsh surgeon Lionel Wafer described a small group of light skinned Kuna people in Panama who were sometimes called “moon eyed” because their eyes were sensitive to daylight. Barton bridged the two stories and mused that the Appalachian Moon Eyed might be related to Wafer’s Kuna acquaintances.
Early nineteenth century historians repeated the basic idea that Cherokee lore remembered a mysterious earlier people. Ezekiel Sanford’s History of the United States Before the Revolution and B. R. Carroll’s Historical Collections of South Carolina both mention Moon Eyed People and attribute the phrase to Cherokee tradition, citing the trader James Adair as a source. Adair, however, never clearly used the term. These early histories were already blending oral traditions, printed speculation, and their authors’ own assumptions about race and origins.
Haywood, Sevier, and the “White People” with Forts
The Moon Eyed People as Barton described them do not stand alone. A generation later, Tennessee jurist John Haywood compiled a different set of stories in his 1823 book The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee. Haywood never uses the phrase “moon eyed,” but he records traditions that the Cherokee encountered an earlier “white people” who occupied the headwaters of the Little Tennessee River, with forts stretching down toward Chickamauga Creek. Those people, he writes, were defeated and driven away, and their memory lingered as traces of old fortifications across Tennessee and Kentucky.
At almost the same time another voice entered the record. In 1810, Tennessee governor John Sevier wrote to Major Amos Stoddard in response to a request for information about the legendary “Welsh Indians.” Sevier recalled a conversation he said he had in 1782 with the Cherokee war leader Oconostota. According to Sevier, Oconostota spoke of ancient stone forts along the Alabama River that had been built by a white people called Welsh, who were eventually driven out by the ancestors of the Cherokee.
Sevier did not name Fort Mountain in that letter. His account concerns ruins along rivers far to the southwest. The link between Sevier’s Welsh “white people” and the wall at Fort Mountain would only be made much later by twentieth century writers and tourism boosters. At this early stage, though, several threads are already in play. Barton writes about “moon eyed” people who cannot stand the sun. Haywood recycles tales of an earlier “white people” with fortifications. Sevier adds the romantic idea of Welsh Indians who raised stone works in the southeast. None of them say anything about Fort Mountain itself.
Mooney’s Synthesis: A Strange Earlier People
At the turn of the twentieth century the ethnographer James Mooney tried to pull these scattered threads together. Working for the Bureau of American Ethnology, Mooney spent several field seasons among the Cherokee in the late 1880s and 1890s. His monumental Myths of the Cherokee summarizes not only stories he heard in person, but also earlier printed works by Barton and Haywood.
Mooney repeats Barton’s phrase about “moon eyed people who could not see in the day time,” treating it as a version of Cherokee tradition. He then sets it alongside Haywood’s story of an earlier “white people” with forts along the Little Tennessee and Chickamauga. To this he adds accounts from his own informants. One tradition he recorded held that when the Cherokee arrived in the region north of the Hiwassee River they found it inhabited by another people, who went west. Another described these former inhabitants as “very small people, perfectly white.”
Mooney did not identify the earlier people as Europeans. Like many writers of his era, he sometimes entertained the nineteenth century “mound builder” idea of a vanished pre-Indian race, a notion that later archaeologists rejected. Yet his book is important because it becomes the main bridge between eighteenth and nineteenth century antiquarians and twentieth century popular treatments of the Moon Eyed People.
From Old Books to a Fort Mountain Legend
The particular marriage of the Moon Eyed People and Fort Mountain’s wall is not as old as the stones themselves. The pairing seems to emerge clearly only in the early twentieth century.
In 1923, The Chattanooga News ran a human interest feature titled “A Search for the Moon Eyed Men of Fort Mountain.” The article linked Barton’s 1797 book to local stories about the stone wall and repeated the idea that the Cherokee had expelled a nocturnal, light sensitive people from the region.
Decades later, when Georgia developed Fort Mountain State Park, interpretive materials leaned heavily on this same cluster of stories. A state historical marker erected in 1968 credited the wall to the Moon Eyed People and, in some versions, tied them to the medieval Welsh prince Madoc. The marker text, preserved today in the Historical Marker Database, describes a people who could not see during certain phases of the moon and who were destroyed by the Creek.
A 1969 feature in the Forsyth County News appears to be the first printed source that explicitly brings Sevier onto Fort Mountain by claiming that he visited the site in 1782 and heard that the wall had been built by “white men from across the great water.”
By the late twentieth century the pattern was set. Park brochures, tourism blurbs, and newspaper pieces repeated a tidy story in which the ancient wall on Fort Mountain was raised by Moon Eyed People, variously described as Welsh pilgrims, albino Indians, or a mysterious race annihilated long ago. In a 1994 Rome News Tribune column, Stacy McCain pushed back at some of these claims. He noted that the idea of “prehistoric white people” did not come from ancient Cherokee chiefs, but from Barton and Haywood, and that both the whiteness and the connection to Fort Mountain were inventions of modern interpreters rather than straightforward tribal memory.
Archaeologists and the Wall Itself
While newspaper writers debated Welsh princes, archaeologists kept returning to the stubborn facts of rock and soil. Philip E. Smith’s 1962 study of “Aboriginal Stone Constructions in the Southern Piedmont” remains one of the main technical sources on the Fort Mountain wall. Working from a 1956 test excavation and field surveys, Smith measured the wall at roughly 928 feet long, with a zigzagging pattern that ties it deliberately into boulders and outcrops along the ridge. He concluded that the wall closely resembles other prehistoric stone enclosures in the region and should be understood as an Indigenous construction, not the work of European explorers or colonial settlers.
The National Register of Historic Places listing for Fort Mountain and the Cohutta Mountains, approved in 1977, takes the same view. It describes the wall as a prehistoric Native American feature whose exact date and function remain uncertain but whose archaeological potential is significant.
Georgia’s own Department of Natural Resources repeats this consensus in its park history. The agency notes that the wall zigzags for about 855 feet along the crest, stands between two and six feet tall, and was probably built between 500 and 1500 CE. The official writeup acknowledges the Moon Eyed legend but frames it as one among many stories about the wall’s origin.
Taken together, these sources strongly suggest that the Fort Mountain wall belongs to the same broad tradition of Middle Woodland or related ceremonial constructions that appear across the Southeast and Ohio Valley. The wall may have marked a boundary, encircled a sacred space, or aligned with rituals we no longer remember. What it almost certainly does not represent is a solitary European fortification stranded above Chatsworth long before Columbus.
Who Were the Moon Eyed People?
If the wall is Indigenous, what can we say about the Moon Eyed People themselves? The answer depends on which source you read, and which community you listen to.
One thread, starting with Barton, presents them as physically unusual. Barton described people who could “not see in the daytime” and associated them with albinism, an idea that echoed in later popular accounts. Through the nineteenth century this fed into wider speculations about an ancient light skinned race responsible for the mounds and stone ruins of eastern North America. Those theories were part of the “mound builder myth” that tried to separate the impressive earthworks and stone works of the interior from the Native nations who still lived there.
Another line of interpretation is Indigenous centered. Seneca scholar Barbara Alice Mann has argued that the Moon Eyed People of Cherokee tradition may remember the Adena culture and related Ohio Valley mound builders. In her book Land of the Three Miamis and in an encyclopedia entry on Ohio Valley mound culture, Mann suggests that the name refers to astronomer priests who tracked the night sky from effigy and circle mounds, and that later Cherokee speakers encountered or absorbed their descendants.
Yet another lens comes from living Cherokee tradition about the “Little People.” In 1998, Eastern Band Cherokee author Lynn King Lossiah published Secrets and Mysteries of the Cherokee Little People, which collects stories about small beings who live in caves, rock shelters, and hidden places. These Little People are not consistently pale. Sometimes they are described as wearing white clothing rather than having white skin, and they function more like spiritual neighbors or trickster figures than like a lost human tribe. Some contemporary storytellers and writers equate them with the Moon Eyed People, while others treat the two as separate strands.
Modern public history writers often try to balance all of these possibilities. Atlas Obscura’s 2024 overview of the Moon Eyed People, for instance, walks through Barton, Haywood, Mooney, the Fort Mountain wall, and contemporary Eastern Band tellings. The article quotes a Fort Mountain State Park manager who notes that the Moon Eyed legend is not a major part of Cherokee history, an important reminder that a handful of stories preserved in English do not define an entire nation’s past.
Legend, Tourism, and Responsibility
By the time twenty first century visitors arrive at Fort Mountain, the physical wall and the layered stories about it have become inseparable in brochures and blog posts. Guides describe the “mysterious 855 foot wall” and then immediately offer the Moon Eyed People as one possible explanation, sometimes followed by Prince Madoc and his supposed Welsh colonists.
For public historians and park interpreters, that popularity is both an opportunity and a challenge. Legends like the Moon Eyed People bring people to the mountain and encourage them to imagine a deeper past. At the same time, older speculative narratives often carried heavy racial baggage. The idea of a white or European race building North America’s ancient monuments before Indigenous peoples arrived was used to deny Native nations their own history and accomplishments.
A responsible telling can thread the needle. We can acknowledge that Cherokee people have told stories about a strange earlier group in the southern highlands, sometimes described as small, sometimes as very white, sometimes as spiritually powerful Little People. We can note that eighteenth and nineteenth century writers like Barton, Haywood, and Sevier recorded versions of those stories, filtered through their own interests and prejudices. We can emphasize that archaeologists see the Fort Mountain wall as the work of Indigenous builders, likely related to broader Woodland era earth and stone works. And we can make clear that romantic tales about Welsh princes or “prehistoric white people” say more about the anxieties and fantasies of early American writers than they do about the lives of people who actually moved stones on that ridge.
Visiting Fort Mountain today, hikers pass an interpretive panel that describes the wall and nods toward the Moon Eyed People, but the stones themselves remain stubbornly quiet. The wall invites questions about continuity, memory, and how stories grow across centuries. It also invites a simple kind of respect. Whatever its original purpose, the wall stands as a rare surviving piece of pre-Cherokee architecture in the Appalachian high country. The least we can do is walk it with care, listen to both Cherokee voices and archaeological evidence, and resist the temptation to fill every gap in our knowledge with a lost white tribe.
Stone Outlasts Story
The Moon Eyed People are easy to picture and hard to pin down. In one telling they are frightened albinos fleeing the dawn. In another they are astronomer priests from the Ohio Valley, remembered in Cherokee tradition as earlier neighbors. In others they are Little People whose stories carry moral lessons about generosity, secrecy, and respect.
The Fort Mountain wall, by contrast, is mute but solid. Its builders did not leave a written explanation. Later storytellers filled that silence with Bartonian speculation, Madoc myths, tourism copy, and half remembered Welsh legends. Today, careful work by archaeologists and Native and non Native scholars is helping to peel those layers apart. The result is not a single neat answer, but something more honest.
The wall on Fort Mountain is almost certainly Indigenous. The Moon Eyed People belong to a family of Cherokee stories about earlier inhabitants and powerful neighbors. The marriage between the two is a twentieth century creation, one that tells us as much about modern Appalachia’s hunger for mystery as it does about the past. When we write about the Moon Eyed People now, we are not just retelling an old legend. We are choosing which parts of that legend to carry forward and whose voices to amplify.
Sources & Further Reading
Benjamin Smith Barton, New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (Philadelphia, 1797). Digitized through Internet Archive and other online collections. Wikipedia+1
Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (London, 1699), for the Panama “moon eyed” people Barton cites. Wikipedia+1
John Haywood, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee: Up to the First Settlements Therein by the White People in the Year 1768 (Nashville, 1823). Southern Gothic+1
John Sevier to Amos Stoddard, October 9, 1810, Newberry Library, Edward E. Ayer Manuscript Collection, correspondence on “Welsh Indians.” collections.newberry.org+1
James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, in the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897–98 (published 1900–1902). Project Gutenberg
Philip E. Smith, “Aboriginal Stone Constructions in the Southern Piedmont,” University of Georgia Laboratory of Archaeology Series Report No. 4 (Athens, 1962). archaeology.uga.edu+1
National Register of Historic Places nomination, “Fort Mountain and Cohutta Mountains, Chatsworth, Murray County, Georgia,” Ref. No. 77001587 (listed 1977). NPGallery+1
Georgia Department of Natural Resources, “Fort Mountain State Park History” and official park page, which summarize archaeological views and present the Moon Eyed tradition as local lore. Georgia State Parks+1
Barbara Alice Mann, Land of the Three Miamis (University of Toledo Press, 2000), and “Ohio Valley Mound Culture” in Encyclopedia of American Indian History (ABC-CLIO, 2008), for Indigenous centered interpretations of mound building cultures and possible Moon Eyed connections. University of Toledo Press+1
Lynn King Lossiah, Secrets and Mysteries of the Cherokee Little People (Cherokee Publications, 1998), the most cited contemporary compilation of Little People traditions. WNC Magazine+1
“Moon Eyed People” and “Fort Mountain (Murray County, Georgia)” entries on Wikipedia, which collate primary references, newspaper features, and marker texts. Wikipedia+1
Atlas Obscura, “Who Were the Mysterious Moon Eyed People of Appalachia?” and History Is Now, “The Moon Eyed People: Legends of Southern Appalachia,” for accessible syntheses that connect the legend to Fort Mountain, Cherokee history, and the long afterlife of the mound builder myth. Atlas Obscura+1