The
Tennessee River, the largest tributary of the
Ohio River, is a long river in the
southeastern United States. The river drains the
Tennessee Valley watershed, and is located within four states: Tennessee,
Alabama,
Mississippi, and
Kentucky. The river begins in
East Tennessee at the confluence of the Holston and French Broad rivers just north of
Knoxville, and runs south through
Chattanooga, whose city limits touch the Tennessee–Georgia border in some places. It then runs into Alabama south of
Nickajack Dam less than one mile from the
tripoint where Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama meet. The river in Tennessee reaches as close as from the Georgia state line in
Marion County. The southern border of Tennessee was declared to be located on the
35th parallel north when Tennessee was established as a state by Congress on June 1, 1796. This would have allowed a small portion of the river to be located within Georgia. Georgia, one of the original
Thirteen Colonies, had become a state on January 2, 1788, but did not sell its western territory to the Federal government until 1802, when the selling agreement declared Georgia's western border to be "a line from the great bend of the Chattahoochee River and thence in a direct line [north] to
Nickajack [a
Cherokee Indian settlement] on the Tennessee River... running up the said Tennessee River and along the Western Bank thereof to the Southern Boundary line of the State of Tennessee." The boundary between Tennessee and Georgia, however, was not surveyed until after the
Alabama Territory was created on December 10, 1817. Shortly thereafter both Tennessee and Georgia's legislatures agreed to conduct a survey of their border. Georgia appointed mathematician and
University of Georgia professor James Camak as part of the surveying team. The survey took place in 1818, and both teams incorrectly determined the 35th parallel north to be south of its actual location. Tennessee's 1819 code describes Nickajack as being located "one mile and twenty-eight poles due south from the south bank of the Tennessee River as found by mathematician James Camak." The actual 35th parallel north crosses the Tennessee River near present-day
Haletown, Tennessee. The equipment the surveyors used was also reportedly outdated, and one of the Georgia surveyors reportedly requested that the governor provide them with more modern equipment. In 1819, the Georgia legislature asked the North Carolina legislature to appoint a surveying team to meet with their team and survey the rest of the boundary. The teams met at
Ellicott's Rock, located along the
Chattooga River, which was constructed by astronomer and surveyor
Andrew Ellicott in 1811, marking what he determined to be the tripoint of Georgia, North Carolina, and
South Carolina, and continued westward until they reached the location where the Georgia and Tennessee teams had stopped surveying the boundary the year before. At this point, the termination of the line surveyed the year before was about north. Instead of attempting to correct the mistake from the year before, the teams instead marked a line directly southward to connect the two lines, an offset that came to be known as Montgomery's Corner after Hugh Montgomery, one of the surveyors on the Georgia team. In 1826, Georgia and Alabama, which had become a state in 1819, agreed to survey their land border. The survey was conducted between where the border splits off from the
Chattahoochee River a few miles north of present-day
West Point, Georgia and the river continues into Georgia, and the tri-point of Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. Georgia again appointed Camak, who described the location of the Nickajack settlement in the survey documents as "about one quarter of a mile north of the Georgia–Tennessee boundary as surveyed in 1818." Camak again expressed a suspicion that his instruments were outdated and inaccurate, but endorsed the results of the survey, believing them to be accurate. ==Disputes==