Lee County

The Chehaw Affair

Lee County

By E. Merton Coulter; Regents’ Professor Emeritus of History, University of Georgia There once stood in Southwest Georgia near Leesburg (northeast of Leesburg) Georgia an immense live oak whose trunk was reputed to be nine feet in diameter and whose boughs measured 120 feet across. The Chehaw Indians who had a village nearby were said to have held their council meetings under this giant tree. In 1912 the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a granite boulder here bearing the follow description: “CHEHAW Large Indian town, home of the Chehaws. A friendly agricultural people of the Creek tribe, who aided …

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The Chehaw Indians

Lee County

By Dr. Lee W. Formwalt; Albany State University Our earliest documentation of the Chehaw Indians goes back four and half centuries to 1540 when southeastern Amerindians encountered Europeans and Africans for the first time. Hernando de Soto and his band of Spanish adventurers came across the Chehaw or Chiaha Indians on Zimmerman’s Island in the French Broad River in present-day Tennessee. By the early eighteenth century, however, the Chehaw had moved south to the Ocmulgee River where they had greater access to the British traders operating out of Charles Town, Carolina (now Charleston, S.C.). A number of Lower Creek Indians …

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