Lower Shawneetown
Lower Shawneetown, also known as Shannoah or Sonnontio, was an 18th-century Shawnee village located within the Lower Shawneetown Archeological District, near South Portsmouth in Greenup County, Kentucky and Lewis County, Kentucky. The population eventually occupied areas on both sides of the Ohio River, and along both sides of the Scioto River in what is now Scioto County, Ohio. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on 28 April 1983. It is near the Bentley site, a Madisonville Horizon settlement inhabited between 1400 CE and 1625 CE. Nearby, to the east, there are also four groups of Hopewell tradition mounds, built between 100 BCE and 500 CE, known as the Portsmouth Earthworks.
Extensive archaeological work has provided a clear picture of the town's appearance and activities, particularly the nature of trade, social organization, agriculture, and relationships with other Native American communities. Well-known British traders William Trent and George Croghan maintained trading posts in the town with large warehouses to store furs, skins, and other goods.
Between about 1734 and 1758 Lower Shawneetown became a center for commerce and diplomacy, "a sort of republic" populated mainly by Shawnee, Iroquois, and Delawares. By 1755, its population exceeded 1,200, making it one of the largest Native American communities in the Ohio Country, second only to Pickawillany. The size and diversity of the town's population attracted both French and British traders, leading to political competition between France and Britain to influence the community in the years preceding the French and Indian War. The town remained politically neutral in spite of frequent visits by French, British and Native American leaders. Several English captives, including Mary Draper Ingles and Samuel Stalnaker, were held captive in Lower Shawneetown in the 1750s.
Lower Shawneetown was abandoned in 1758 to avoid colonial American raids during the French and Indian War, and was relocated further up the Scioto River to the Pickaway Plains.
Foundation and names
Established in the mid-1730s at the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio Rivers, Lower Shawneetown was one of the earliest known Shawnee settlements on the Ohio River. The first reference to the town is found in a letter of 27 July 1734, written by François-Marie Bissot, Sieur de Vincennes, describing an English trader's warehouse in "the home of the Shawnees on the Ohio River." Historian Charles A. Hanna proposes that the town was established by Shaweygila Shawnees who had been forced out of their home on the Monongahela River by the Six Nations chiefs. The first reference to the Lower Shawneetown by that name was in a letter by William Trent on 20 October 1748, reporting a murder at Kuskusky, when a Virginia trader there was killed following an altercation over some liquor, "which he was tying up, in order to send to the Lower Shawna Town."The Shawnee name of the town is unknown, but evidence suggests that it may have been "Chillicothe," a Shawnee word meaning "principal place" and typically applied to villages of the Chalahgawtha division of the Shawnees, who dominated the town. On English maps the town was labeled "the Lower Shawonese Town," "the lower Shawanees town," "Lower Shanna Town," "the Shannoah town," or "Shawnoah." The French called it "Saint Yotoc", "Sinhioto," "Sononito," "Sonnioto," "Scioto," "Sonyoto," and "Cenioteaux."
Lower Shawneetown was downstream from the much smaller Upper Shawneetown, established about 1751 at the confluence of the Ohio River and the Kanawha River, near present-day Point Pleasant, West Virginia and known to the Shawnees as Chinoudaista or Chinodahichetha.
Description
Location
Pressure from the growing European populations on the east coast of North America and in southern Canada had caused Native American populations to concentrate in the Ohio River Valley, and Lower Shawneetown was situated at a convenient point, accessible to many communities living on tributaries of the Ohio River. The area had Iroquois, Delaware, Wyandot, and Miami communities within a few days' journey. The town also lay near the Seneca Trail, which was used by Cherokees and Catawbas, and the opportunity to trade for furs and to broker political alliances attracted both British and French traders. Within a few years of its establishment, the town became a key center in dealings between Native American tribes and Europeans.The community was initially built on the south bank of the Ohio River opposite its confluence with the Scioto River, on floodplains and terraces, with later growth of a sub-community on the north bank of the Ohio, along the east and west banks of the Scioto. The Ohio community on the east side of the Scioto, where the village council-house was located, soon became significantly larger than the Kentucky community.
Composition
Historian Richard White characterizes Lower Shawneetown and other growing Native American settlements in the region, including Logstown, Pickawillany, Kuskusky, and Kittanning as "Indian republics," multiethnic and autonomous, made up of a variety of smaller disparate social groups: village fragments, extended families, or individuals, often survivors of epidemics and refugees from conflicts with other Native Americans or with Europeans. According to historian Richard Warren, "It was a sprawling series of wickiups and longhouses... French and British-allied traders regarded Lower Shawneetown as one of two capitals of the Shawnee tribe."Although mainly a Shawnee village, the population included contingents of Seneca and Lenape. After his visit to Lower Shawneetown in 1749, Céloron de Blainville wrote:
this village composed for the most part of Chavenois and Iroquois of the Five Nations...men from the Sault St. Louis, there are also some from the Lake of Two Mountains, some Loups from the Miami, and nearly all the nations from the territory of Enhault."
Size and housing
In 1749, Joseph Pierre de Bonnecamps estimated that the entire town had about 60 cabins, but by 1751, the town consisted of 40 houses on the Kentucky side located along bluffs above the floodplain, and 100 houses on the Ohio side atop a forty-foot river bank lined with sycamores and willows. In the town center on the Ohio side there was a long council house and a large open area or plaza for public events. Houses were clustered together according to kinship, interspersed with gardens, trash heaps and family burial plots. The remains of 23 individuals have been recovered from 16 graves at the Bentley site, among which there were 19 children and adolescents and four adults. Including its 300 warriors, the town may have had a total population of between 1,200 and 1,500. In 1753, after a flood destroyed part of the town which had been on the Scioto River's west bank, some residents relocated to the east bank, and others moved to the Kentucky side of the Ohio River.According to A. Gwynn Henderson, eighteenth-century homes in this community would have resembled those of the Fort Ancient inhabitants :
...Long rectangular buildings with rounded corners constructed of frameworks of wooden posts set singly into the ground and covered with either thatch, bark, mats or skins. Trade blankets or skins provided "doors" at the ends of the houses. Interior partitions broke up the space within each house, and hearths were located in the center of earthen floors. Pits for storage lined the walls; trash was disposed in outdoor pits or on the ground in heaps behind the house. Bundles of dried food hung from the rafters. However, Europeans described some buildings as huts, cabins or houses--structures with squared logs and covered with bark or clapboard. A few even had chimneys.
Surrounding countryside
Lower Shawneetown was surrounded by fertile, alluvial flatlands that were ideal for growing corn, beans, squash, gourds, tobacco, and sunflowers. The remains of charred Northern flint corn have been documented archaeologically. The area around the town contained abundant resources: hardwood forests, grasslands, canebrakes, nut-bearing trees, freshwater springs and some with brine. Wildlife included bear, deer, elk, and bison. Tools and pottery could be made from chert-bearing bedrock and clay riverbanks.In a journal entry from February, 1751, Christopher Gist describes the Ohio country in the area of Lower Shawneetown:
All the Way from the Shannoah Town...is fine, rich, level, Land, well timbered with large Walnut, Ash, Sugar Trees, Cherry Trees, &c; it is well watered with a great Number of little Streams or Rivulets, and full of beautiful natural Meadows, covered with wild Rye, blue Grass, and Clover, and abounds with Turkeys, Deer, Elks, and most Sorts of Game, particularly Buffaloes, thirty or forty of which are frequently seen feeding in one Meadow...a most delightful Country. The Ohio and all the large Branches are said to be full of fine Fish of several Kinds, particularly a Sort of Cat Fish of a prodigious Size.
Residents of the town used Raven Rock, a 500-foot-high sandstone rock formation on the Ohio side, as a lookout point to observe traffic on the Ohio River. Located about 5.5 miles southwest of the town center, the rock allowed lookouts to survey a 14-mile stretch of the river upstream and downstream. It is today part of Raven Rock State Nature Preserve.