Park at Kellytown Archaeological Site Will Have Native American Name

FOREST HILLS, TN — For nearly two decades, it's been known as "Kellytown," named for the owner of the land at the corner of Hillsboro Road and Old Hickory Boulevard, straddling the Davidson-Williamson county line between Forest Hills and Brentwood. But heretofore, it will bear a word much more descriptive and fitting of its history.

WPLN reports that former Forest Hills mayor Bill Coke asked the Metro Parks Board to name a park planned for the Kellytown site with a word that honors its heritage: "Aaittafama’." In the Chickasaw language, it means "a place for meeting together."

No one knows what the people who lived in the village, which was populated with about 60 families during the early and middle Mississippian period (between 900 and 1450 AD), called their home. In fact, until the late 1990s, no one even knew it was there at all. Though archaeologists had some inkling the site had importance as early as the late 1970s, it wasn't until the Tennessee Department of Transportation announced a plan to add a turn lane from Hillsboro Road on to Old Hickory Boulevard in the late 1990s that the sheer scope of the village was known. Workers found dozens of pieces of evidence of a village in just 30 feet of right of way. By the time the site review was completed, archaeologists found 12 buildings, seven graves and two palisade lines designed to protect the village from intruders and wild animals.

In 2014, the Friends of Kellytown, the City of Forest Hills and Metro were able to pool enough money to buy the site for development as a park. Plans call for outdoor classrooms, a native plant meadow, sculptures, reproductions of the village's buildings and greenway connections into both the Brentwood and Metro systems.

And the name, Ridley Wills told WPLN, is meant to raise questions and draw in the curious.

“The idea is that it makes people ask: What is this?” he said. “We will have, underneath it on signage, an archaeological explanation.”

The choice of the Chickasaw language is an appropriate one: the Chickasaw are among the dozens of tribes which emerged after the widespread disappearance of Mississippian culture between 1450 and 1500. Further, the Chickasaws were friendly with James Robertson, the founder of Nashville, and joined with white settlers to fight off attacks by the Chickamaugan alliance, which was attacking settlements in Middle Tennessee with support of the Spanish, which had designs on the region. In 1783, Chickasaw chiefs signed a treaty in which white settlers promised not infringe on their trade and designating the land south of the Duck River for the tribe. Settlers and Chickasaws regularly teamed up to fight off the Cherokees, Creeks and others and it's unlikely the Nashville settlement would have survived repeated onslaughts by the other tribes without Chickasaw aid. The treaty is commemorated with a historical marker in West Park.

Image via City of Forest Hills