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 and 1625. 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"Thwaites, Reuben Gold, The French Regime in Wisconsin and the Northwest, Vol I: 1634-1760. State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1908 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.Stephen Warren, Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America, UNC Press Books, 2014 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-1730sA. Gwynn Henderson, David Pollack, "A Native History of Kentucky: Selections from Chapter 17: Kentucky," in Native America: A State-by-State Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Daniel S. Murphree, Volume 1, pages 393-440; Greenwood Press, Santa Barbara, CA. 2012O'Donnell, James H. Ohio's First Peoples, Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004. (paperback), (hardcover)Charles Augustus Hanna, The Wilderness Trail: Or, The Ventures and Adventures of the Pennsylvania Traders on the Allegheny Path, Volume 1, Putnam's sons, 1911 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.Charles Augustus Hanna, The Wilderness Trail: Or, The Ventures and Adventures of the Pennsylvania Traders on the Allegheny Path Volume 2, Putnam's sons, 1911Caudill, Courtney B., "Mischiefs So Close to Each Other": External Relations of the Ohio Valley Shawnees, 1730-1775." Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539625770, May 1992 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."Samuel Hazard, ed. Pennsylvania Archives: 1st Series: Selected and Arranged from Original Documents in the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, Conformably to Acts of the General Assembly, February 15, 1851, and March 1, 1852. Pennsylvania, Secretary of the Commonwealth. J. Severns, 1853
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"O. H. Marshall, "De Celoron's Expedition to the Ohio in 1749, Magazine of American History, March, 1878 (which may be a corruption of Scioto), "Sinhioto," "Sononito," "Sonnioto," "Scioto," "Sonyoto," and "Cenioteaux."A. Gwynn Henderson, "The Lower Shawnee Town on Ohio: Sustaining Native Autonomy in an Indian "Republic." In Craig Thompson Friend, ed., The Buzzel about Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land, University Press of Kentucky, 1999; pp. 25-56. Ermine Wheeler Voegelin, An Ethnohistorical Report on the Indian Use and Occupancy of Royce Area 11, Ohio and Indiana, 2 vols. (New York: Garland Press, 1974), vol 1, p. 261.
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.Phillip R. Shriver, "Lower Shawnee Town on the Eve of the French and Indian War," Ohio Archaeologist, Vol 40:3, Summer 1990, pp 16-21Andrew Lee Feight, "Lower Shawnee Town and Celoron's Expedition," Scioto HistoricalRobert F. Maslowski, "Appalachian Migrations: Historic and Prehistoric." In Instances of Prehistoric and Historic Archaeology in the Mountainous Areas of the Eastern United States: Papers from Upland Archaeology in the East Symposium XI, Clarence R. Geir, Compiler, pp. 49-63. James Madison University, 2012
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,Jerry E. Clark, "A System Model of Shawnee Indian Migration," Transactions of the Nebraska Academy of Sciences, Vol VII, 1979. 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.Gordon Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, The Penguin library of American Indian history; Penguin, 2007.
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.Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 Cambridge studies in North American Indian history, Cambridge University Press, 1991. 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 [is] composed for the most part of Chavenois (Shawnee) and Iroquois of the Five Nations...men from the Sault St. Louis (Kahnawake), there are also some from the Lake of Two Mountains (Mohawks of Kanesatake), some Loups from the Miami (Munsee), and nearly all the nations from the territory of Enhault (Pays d'en Haut, the territory of New France to the west of Montreal)."
Size and housing In 1749, Joseph Pierre de Bonnecamps estimated that the entire town had about 60 cabins,Joseph Pierre de Bonnecamps, "Relation du voyage de la Belle Rivière faite en 1749, sous les ordres de M. de Céloron," in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, 73 vols. Cleveland: Burrow Brothers, 1896-1901, vol. 69 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.Henry F. Dobyns, William R. Swagerty, Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America, ACLS Humanities E-Book; Native American historic demography series; Newberry Library. Center for the History of the American Indian, University of Tennessee Press, 1983. 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.David Pollack and A. Gwynn Henderson, "A Preliminary Report on the Contact Period Occupation at Lower Shawneetown (15GP15), Greenup County, Kentucky." Paper presented at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Central States Anthropological Society on April 9, 1982.James Everett Seaver, Charles Delamater Vail, A Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison: The White Woman of the Genesee, American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, 1918.
According to A. Gwynn Henderson, eighteenth-century homes in this community would have resembled those of the Fort Ancient inhabitants (a Native American culture that occupied the region from about 1000-1750 CE):
...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