Koweta Heritage

Echoes of the old Koweta Town still resound in my life. It is my ancestral Creek tribal town. I am a descendant of William McIntosh's daughter, Catherine McIntosh, a Creek girl who in the difficult years of the Indian Removal era married fellow mixed blood Creek William Cousins. She and her husband along with several other Creek families came to what is now Walton County, Florida, not long after the Creek Nation was forcibly removed to the western Indian Territory. Cathe-rine and William Cousins are buried in a small cemetery called Crowder Chapel Cemetery, where other Eastern Creek Indian people are buried. These Eastern Creek who was not removed lived in their own small settlements after coming to Florida, and the several families of our contemporary community of Eastern Creek derived from the sev-eral related families which migrated to Walton County, Florida about 1848, not long after the Indian Removals ended and clearing of the Seminole from the area. Among the Creek families who settled here was Catherine McIntosh Cousins and her family. In some documents, the Bureau of Indian Affairs described these Eastern Creek settle-ments on the Florida side of the state line, in generations past. "The descendant families were somewhat concentrated, particularly in the 19th century, in an isolated, rural agri-cultural area on the Shoal River".