Hickory Ground was established by Muscogee Creeks who migrated from Little Tulsa on the Coosa River. Among its residents was Billy Weatherford, the Red Eagle, whose attack on Fort Mims in 1813 triggered the Creek War. When that war came to Hickory Ground itself, the inhabitants who were not fighting were confined at nearby Fort Jackson. The Treaty of Fort Jackson in 1814 stripped the Creek Nation of 23 million acres, and though the people of Hickory Ground were allowed to resettle their town afterward, they lived under a shrinking sovereignty. In 1832, the federal government completed the process, forcibly removing the community to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. There, the displaced families founded a new Hickory Ground near Henryetta, Oklahoma. It was from this second Hickory Ground that Chitto Harjo, the firebrand traditionalist known as Crazy Snake, launched his 1901 uprising against the allotment of tribal lands.

The 33-acre archaeological site, designated 1EE89, sits outside Wetumpka on a bend of the lower Coosa River. In 1968, archaeologist David Chase of Auburn University rediscovered the site, though his findings remained unpublished for years. When plans surfaced to build apartments on the land, the Alabama Historical Commission and the Poarch Band of Creek Indians moved to acquire it, securing the property in early 1980 through $165,000 in matching funds from the U.S. Department of the Interior. Excavations in 1988 and 1991 revealed five distinct cultural periods of occupation, from the Early Archaic period (8,000-6,000 B.C.) through the historic Muscogee era. The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places on March 10, 1980 -- a recognition that this patch of Alabama riverbank holds one of the deepest continuous records of human habitation in the southeastern United States.

In August 1980, the property was granted to the Poarch Band of Creek Indians. What happened next split two peoples. After years of holding the land, the Poarch Band began construction of a gaming hall in 2001, which required excavating the site and exhuming Muscogee graves. The Oklahoma-based Muscogee Creek Nation objected fiercely: this was their ancestral capital, their burial ground. On October 12, 2012, the Inter-Tribal Council of the Five Civilized Tribes -- Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Muscogee, and Seminole -- unanimously adopted a resolution calling for the desecration to stop. Two months later, the Muscogee Creek Nation filed a federal lawsuit alleging violations of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The Poarch Band countered that they had purchased the land to save it from a big-box retailer, and that tribal sovereignty required economic development. A multi-story hotel now stands on the site.

The Coosa River still bends past Hickory Ground the way it did when Bartram sketched its banks in the 1770s. The ceremonial ground, the burial sites, and the refuse middens that archaeologists catalogued are now beneath or beside a modern commercial development. The controversy has never fully resolved. For the Muscogee Creek Nation, Hickory Ground represents the last place their ancestors governed themselves before removal -- a site whose sacred character survives any building placed on top of it. For the Poarch Band, it represents the difficult arithmetic of sovereignty: a tribe with no other land in trust, building an economy to sustain self-governance. The story of Hickory Ground is, in the end, a story about what happens when the weight of 10,000 years of history meets the pressures of the present -- and neither side has the power to make the other whole.