The flat, cleared land known as the Watauga Old Fields along the shoals of the Watauga River drew Anglo-American settlers in the late 1760s, who occupied Cherokee hunting grounds beyond the boundary set by royal proclamation. In 1772 these settlers formed the Watauga Association, an early frontier compact for self-government created because the area fell outside any colony's recognized jurisdiction. The site also hosted the 1775 negotiations between land speculator Richard Henderson and Cherokee leaders that produced the Transylvania Purchase, a twenty-million-acre land cession attended by roughly twelve hundred Cherokee and opposed by the war leader Dragging Canoe. After Cherokee attacks in 1776, settlers built the stockaded Fort Watauga (originally Fort Caswell) as a defensive refuge where several hundred settlers sheltered under a small garrison. Beyond defense, the shoals functioned as a regional crossroads and militia muster ground, most notably in September 1780, when roughly a thousand Overmountain Men gathered there before marching to fight at the Battle of Kings Mountain. Trails linking the settlement to Virginia and North Carolina made it an important hub for frontier trade and communication. Today a reconstructed fort, built in the 1970s for the national bicentennial based on archaeological findings, anchors a Tennessee State Historic Area offering museum exhibits and living-history interpretation of frontier settlement life.