In the 1800s, the United States was a new, vastly underdeveloped nation on the fringe of the western world.
The commercial future of Chattanooga began between the nexus of 1816 and 1835, a period of almost 20 years.
Before there was a Chattanooga the Cherokees inhabited the land. About 50,000 Cherokees are believed have populated an area of some 40,000 square miles, including parts of North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, when the Europeans came in 1540.
In terms of their daily life, they were hunter-gatherers who gradually adopted subsistence farming. The hunter-gatherer model requires, according to researchers, at least seven square miles per capita to flourish.
Cherokee women did most of the farming, harvesting crops of corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers. Cherokee man did most of the hunting shooting deer, bear, wild turkeys, and small game. They also fished along the rivers.
The earliest stages of commerce were clearly trading between Native Americans, frontiersmen and European explorers and later soldiers. This involved exchanges of furs, pelts, forest nuts and crops from subsistence farming in exchange for goods that Cherokees could not produce like knifes, muskets, plows, and woolens.
One early report from 1808 tells of a boat loaded with green and dried apples, potatoes, pickled beets, vinegar, whiskey, and brandy to be sold to “whites, soldiers and Indians”.
The future Chattanooga began in 1816 when Ross’s Landing was established as a trading post for frontiersman and Native Americans by John and Lewis Ross near what are now the southern piers of Market Street Bridge. Ross’s Landing consisted of a store, warehouse, and ferry. It seems likely that less than 200 people lived there.
Chattanooga for a time was a frontier settlement lying at the edge of open or opening land. The local economy over the next several decades would continue to change as ambitious men moved into the area and land was opened up south of the River after the Treaty of New Echota in 1835.
Hamilton County was established in the state legislature in 1819. In the 1820 census there were only 829 residents in the county which at that time mostly North of the Tennessee River, south of the river was still prohibited to most non-Native Americans.
Chattanooga itself was officially incorporated by the Tennessee General Assembly on December 20, 1839.
As to the economy of the 1830s, it was mostly agrarian according to the census of 1840. Hamilton County recorded 8,175 people. Only 30 persons gave commerce as their occupation, 192 listed manufacturing and trade, and 40 came under the official category of “learned professions or engineering”.
The years from 1816 to 1835 are clearly the starting point of the commercial interest that materialized in the 1830s and was reported in the 1840 census.
In the northern part of the county in the 1830s a few general stores and grist mills could be found in Sale Creek, Soddy, North Chickamauga, and Mountain Creek. In 1836 a cotton gin could be found on Soddy Creek.
In 1832, improvements were undertaken to make the Tennessee River more navigable. 1837 the first Post Office was established. In 1838 the first newspaper, The Hamilton Gazette, was published. In 1839, Chattanooga elected its first Mayor, Joseph Enfield Berry.
The 1835 treaty and the forces of growth were all that was needed to attract bright entrepreneurs to the emerging community of Chattanooga. Men saw opportunity and they pursued it with administrative skill and finance.
Much happened in the 1930s, leading to the growth of the 1840s. On January 2, 1840, the state legislature authorized a referendum on the location of a courthouse for Hamilton County. The act named Henry Gotcher, George Luttrell, William Clift, Richard Price, Jonathan Wood, Alfred M. Roger, and James A. Whiteside commissioners to determine a suitable place for “the seat of justice.” They were empowered to purchase land, determine the number and length of streets, sell lots, reserve certain areas for a public square and a jail, and name the community. The sale of the lots was intended to cover the cost of development. Some four or five hundred lots were advertised for sale in March of 1839.
The economy of Chattanooga was created because of the Tennessee River and its rich lands. Industrious and visionary people came early and worked hard. The economy would grow and change generation after generation to this present day.
(Special thanks to the excellent work of the late James W. Livingood in his book the History of Hamilton County Tennessee.)
----