Long hunter and surveyor Isaac Bledsoe first visited the salt lick and spring known as Bledsoe's Lick in 1772 and returned with his family and other settlers in 1780. After an initial settlement attempt failed, Isaac and his brother Anthony Bledsoe built a civilian stockaded fort in 1783 that was not a military post but a cluster of family residences, roughly fifteen log buildings about sixteen by twenty feet each, enclosed within a stockade covering about an acre and a half. The fort functioned as a communal refuge and agricultural settlement for early families establishing homesteads in the Cumberland region amid ongoing conflict, and at its peak housed more than one hundred people, with roughly one-third to one-half being enslaved African Americans living alongside free settler families. At least seven families resided there between 1784 and 1796; as the threat of attack diminished, residents gradually moved out to individual farms, and the fort was fully abandoned by 1806. Today Bledsoe's Fort Historic Park preserves the fort site, a pioneer cemetery, a monument to Isaac Bledsoe, the spring and an associated long hunter camp, and relocated historic cabins, connected by roughly a mile of interpretive trails. Since 1995, the Bledsoe's Lick Historical Association and Middle Tennessee State University have conducted ongoing archaeological research there into the daily life of the fort's diverse inhabitants.