GEORGETOWN, Tenn. – A few hundred yards from the intersection of Tennessee State routes 58 and 60 in Meigs County lies the original roadbed of a portion of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, a segment state historians believe deserves a national place of honor and distinction.
The Tennessee Historical Commission voted in January to nominate the site to the National Register of Historic Places for its role in one of America’s darker moments when the Trail of Tears traced a path of despair for the Cherokee from their homeland in Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina to the Indian Territory in modern-day Oklahoma.
The Georgetown property belongs to Greg Vital, who owns hundreds of acres in the area of the trail and finds it deeply moving to think about what the trail means to the history of the area.
“It is very overwhelming when you think of it in the context of what occurred there [184] years ago,” Vital said Wednesday in a telephone interview. “The sections of the Trail of Tears in most cases have completely disappeared because of progress and development and the fact that they were long and narrow and stretched a long ways from East Tennessee and North Carolina all the way to Oklahoma.”