Old Fort takes its name from a small frontier stockade built here in the 1770s — the Davidson Fort — at the edge of what was then claimed Cherokee territory. The town sits where the Piedmont meets the steep climb into the Black and Blue Ridge ranges, a chokepoint for travel and trade. Choosing an arrowhead as the monument was a deliberate gesture: a Native American form, carved at scale, planted in stone at the foot of the depot. Local Catawba community leaders attended the 1930 unveiling, which mattered then and matters now. They had not been consulted on whose history the monument would tell, but they came, and their presence kept the dedication from being only one side's story.

The monument was carved entirely by hand from a single block of granite, the kind of slow craftsmanship that the early twentieth century still valued enough to organize a town festival around. Period accounts from the McDowell News and the Asheville Citizen-Times describe a multi-day celebration leading up to July 27, with parades, speeches, and a schedule of Independence Day-style events stretched across the week. For travelers arriving by train in the 1930s, the arrowhead became the visual signature of Old Fort — the thing you saw from the platform that told you where you were.

Old Fort's railroad era faded along with the passenger trains. The depot stopped being a stop. The town's economy shifted to small manufacturing and tourism. Through all of it, the Arrowhead Monument kept its place in the town square, still pointed at the sky, still wrapped in lights at Christmas and bunting on the Fourth of July. It is the kind of small-town monument that earns its longevity by simply being woven into local ritual — the place where high school photos get taken, where parade routes turn, where directions begin with as you pass the arrowhead. The monument remains as of 2023, decorated for holidays exactly as it has been for nearly a century.

The 1930 inscription speaks of peace between pioneers and Native Americans. That language reflects its era. The actual history is darker and more honest: by the time settlers were building Davidson Fort, the Cherokee had already been pressed westward by treaties they had little power to refuse, and the Catawba had been similarly diminished by disease and dispossession. The monument names a peace whose terms were largely dictated. Reading it today asks something of the viewer — to hold both the genuine intention behind the gesture and the unequal ground beneath it. The Catawba elders who came in 1930 understood this. They came anyway, and their presence is part of what the granite remembers.