[3] He noted that it ran 145 miles (233 km) from Charlestown to the Congarees, a fort at the confluence of the Saluda and Broad rivers.

It was a total of 302 miles (486 km) from Charlestown to Keowee, the principal Cherokee town of what the colonists called the Lower Towns along the Keowee River and its tributaries (in present-day Oconee, Greenville, Pickens and Anderson counties), which extended into northeastern Georgia.

Remnants of both these original pathways are visible in many places to the side of the nearby modern roads that parallel them.

The main path continued to the Cherokee Middle Towns along the upper Little Tennessee River and its tributaries, where the later European-American settlements of Franklin and Murphy developed in North Carolina).

[citation needed] During the American Revolution, the Cherokee Path was used as a military road by rebel militia raised by the states of Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia against the Cherokee, who had raided numerous frontier settlements in June 1776.

[4][5] Two acres, crossed by the Cherokee Path, is the portion of the Sterling Land Grant listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.