As Europeans began settling the Trans-Appalachian frontier, the shoals proved strategic militarily, as well as shaped the economies of Tennessee and Kentucky.

[2][3] Explorer James Robertson (later a founder of Nashville) identified the alluring flatlands at Sycamore Shoals, known as the Watauga Old Fields, in 1770, and led a group of colonists to the area shortly thereafter.

Excavations in the flats around Sycamore Shoals have uncovered evidence of significant habitation dating back to the Woodland period (ca.

[4] By the late 17th century, the Mississippian-period inhabitants had largely vanished, and had been replaced by the Cherokee, who used Sycamore Shoals as a gathering place and hunting camp.

By the 1760s, long hunters such as Julius Dugger and Andrew Greer were operating stations in the Watauga Valley in the vicinity of Sycamore Shoals.

In 1769, William Bean, known traditionally as Tennessee's first permanent white settler, built a cabin at the confluence of Boone's Creek and the Watauga, about 15 miles (24 km) downstream from the Shoals.

Around the same time, John Honeycut was operating out of a hut at the mouth of Roan Creek (about 20 miles upstream from the Shoals, now part of Watauga Lake).

[3] In the Spring of 1770, James Robertson, possibly fleeing the turmoil created by the Regulator Movement in his home state of North Carolina, made an excursion into the Watauga Valley.

[10] The defeat of the Shawnee in Lord Dunmore's War in 1774 emboldened land speculators in North Carolina, who believed much of what is now Kentucky and Tennessee would soon be under British control.

Between March 14 and March 17, 1775, Henderson, Boone, and several associates met at Sycamore Shoals with Cherokee leaders Attakullakulla, Oconastota, Willanawaw, Doublehead and Dragging Canoe, the latter of whom sought unsuccessfully to reject Henderson's purchase of tribal lands outside the Donelson line, and departed the conference vowing to turn the lands "dark and bloody" if settlers attempted to settle upon them.

After the treaty was signed, Boone proceeded northward to blaze the Wilderness Road, connecting the Transylvania Purchase lands with the Holston settlements.

The Watauga and Nolichucky settlers organized themselves into the "Washington District" and formed a Committee of Safety, which set out to purchase arms and ammunition.

Washington County militiamen, who along with the Holston and Southwest Virginia militiamen comprised a frontier militia known as the Overmountain Men, took part in various engagements throughout the war, including the Siege of Charleston (historian Samuel Cole Williams dubbed the siege's Washington County participants the first "volunteers" of Tennessee)[13] and the Battle of Musgrove Mill.

In late 1780, Major Patrick Ferguson led an army of loyalists into the Appalachian Mountains to cover Cornwallis' invasion of North Carolina.

In 1909, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed an obelisk, constructed from local river rock and set on a concrete base, at the intersection of West G Street and Monument Place in Elizabethton,[15] one half-mile from the mouth of Gap Creek at Watauga River, where Tennessee historian J. G. M. Ramsey recorded within his Annals of Tennessee as where Fort Watauga had once stood.

Today, Sycamore Shoals State Historic Park hosts various annual reenactments regarding the siege of Fort Watauga and the mustering of the Overmountain Men.

A walking trail follows the south bank of the Watauga, allowing easy access to the Sycamore Shoals, with various interpretive signs explaining the various historical events along the way.