Icehouse Bottom is a prehistoric Native American site in Monroe County, Tennessee, located on the Little Tennessee River in the southeastern United States. Native Americans were using the site as a semi-permanent hunting camp as early as 7500 BC, making it one of the oldest-known habitation areas in what is now the state of Tennessee. Analysis of the site's Woodland period (1000 BC - 1000 AD) artifacts shows evidence of an extensive trade network that reached to indigenous peoples in Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio. This was later an area of known Cherokee settlements, the historic people encountered by Anglo-European settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Since 1979, the Icehouse Bottom site has been submerged by Tellico Lake, an impoundment of the Little Tennessee River created by the construction of Tellico Dam. Excavations were conducted at the site in the early 1970s prior to dam construction, in anticipation of inundation. Tellico Lake was developed by and is managed by the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the shoreline immediately above the Icehouse Bottom site is part of the McGhee-Carson Unit of the Tellico Lake Wildlife Management Area, which is managed by the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency.
Geographical setting
The Little Tennessee River enters Monroe County from the east, where it has sliced a gap between the Great Smoky Mountains and the Unicoi Mountains. It winds westward for some before emptying into the Tennessee River near Lenoir City. Tellico Lake, created in 1979, covers the lower of the Little Tennessee and the lower of the Tellico River.
Icehouse Bottom is an archeological site of ancient human occupation that was located along the south bank of the Little Tennessee. Prior to construction of the dam and creation of Tellico Lake, this site was approximately above the mouth of the river at its confluence with the Tennessee River, and nearly above the river's confluence with the Tellico River. The site was located immediately downstream from the base of a steep hill known as Rockcrusher Bluff.
The McGhee-Carson Unit of the Tellico Lake Wildlife Management Area includes what was once the top of Rockcrusher Bluff. When Tellico Lake was filled and flooded the area, the bluff became a peninsula. The entrance to McGhee-Carson is located along Tennessee State Route 360 (Citico Road), a few miles south of the road's junction with U.S. Route 411. Carson Road traverses the unit, ending abruptly at the lakeshore above what was once Icehouse Bottom.
Historical information
Although little historical information regarding Icehouse Bottom is available, numerous historical areas later developed within a two-mile (3-km) radius. Fort Loudoun, a frontier fort built in 1756, was located about one mile to the north, and the Tellico Blockhouse, a federal trading outpost built in 1794, was located slightly more than a mile to the northeast. The Overhill Cherokee villages of Tomotley and Toqua were located opposite Rockcrusher Bluff to the south. The Overhill village of Tuskegee, which is best known as the birthplace of the Cherokee scholar Sequoyah, was located almost immediately northwest of the Icehouse Bottom site.
In 1819, the Cherokee sold the Overhill territory south of the Little Tennessee River, which included all of what is now Monroe County, to the United States government. Shortly thereafter, an early settler known as "Pioneer" John McGhee purchased several thousand acres along the Little Tennessee River, including the Icehouse Bottom site. He developed some plantations in the area. By the early 1900s, the Icehouse Bottom site was within the boundaries of a tobacco farm owned by John Carson. Carson's family owned the land when the Tennessee Valley Authority began buying property along the river for the creation of the Tellico Reservoir.
Although it is unclear how Icehouse Bottom got its name, historian Carson Brewer wrote of a McGhee family story that recalled an "ice-house" located in the 1800s on their lands in the Little Tennessee Valley. According to Brewer, a hole about in circumference would be dug in winter, and ice would be cut from the river or a frozen stream, placed in the hole, and covered with sand. This preserved the ice through the following summer.