Dobbins Stand

Big Swan Creek runs off the western Highland Rim to the Duck River, and the valley it cuts was among the first parts of Lewis County settled. A stand stood somewhere along it: David Dobbins opened one on Swan Creek in 1808, and it is one of about ten known on the Tennessee length of the Natchez Trace. That is very nearly all anyone knows. The Park Service does not list it, no marker records it, and the whole of the evidence is a line in a compiled register of the stands giving a name, a year and a creek. The overlook above the valley carries the creek's name, not his. Nobody has ever located it on the ground. A name, a year and a creek is the whole of the record. No marker records it and the Park Service does not list it.

Most of the Trace is documented like this, or worse. These were log buildings put up cheaply, on land nobody held clear title to, abandoned within a generation when the through traffic stopped. Of the ten Tennessee stands only four carry a keeper's name at all, two carry no date, and the only building left standing anywhere in the state is Gordon's on the Duck River, which was not built until 1818, sixteen years after that stand opened. What the record actually preserves is not the places but the names they left on creeks and crossroads, which is why a scenic pullout six and a half miles from the Meriwether Lewis site is called Swan View. The stand is a line in a register and a name on a creek.