HISTORIC

The Creek Heritage Trail is a series of interpretive panel installations throughout the lower Chattahoochee Valley relating the history of the Creek Indians which once called this region home. One of North America’s most sophisticated and powerful native groups, the Creek Nation at its height in the late 1700s included over 20,000 people living in more than seventy towns along the rivers of eastern Alabama and western Georgia. Just a generation later in the 1830s, the Creeks’ no longer owned their ancestral domain and the great majority of the Creek people had been removed west of the Mississippi.

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The Creek Heritage Trail focuses on the people, places, and events which played a role in this dramatic change. In addition to examining important aspects of Creek daily life in this region, the trail addresses the process by which the Creeks were dispossessed of their homeland and its associated early American settlement. Featured topics include the causes and consequences of the Creek and Seminole Wars, Creek-American diplomacy, and the saga of Creek Removal—the Creek “Trail of Tears.” Panel installations are located in areas significant to the events they interpret—near town sites, battlefields, meeting grounds, and other locations important in the Creeks’ story.