For the better part of a century, the only sign of a fort in Old Fort was a historical marker in the middle of town. A small band of men and women have set out to change that, and log by pointed log, weekend by weekend, they get a little closer to their goal.

In a field between Interstate 40 and a furniture mill, a palisade wall of logs rises, looking more like big sharpened pencils sticking pointy end up out of the dirt than the 120-by-120-foot picturesque frontier fort it will grow to be.

Each 12-foot log is raised into position by hand. It's hard, slow work, just as it was in the 1700s, but it's safe to say that these volunteers are having a lot more fun than the original builders.

The town's namesake was called Davidson's Fort, built in the 1700s on land owned by Samuel Davidson. In 1776, during the American Revolution, Gen. Griffith Rutherford raised a militia of farmers, trappers and frontiersmen to fight the Cherokee, who had sided with the British. The volunteers camped at the fort on their way deeper into the mountains.

The last remnants of the structure washed away in the great floods of 1916, and the fort was largely forgotten with the coming of the railroad and the mills. In recent years, a band of historical true believers has set out to build a new fort, this one an outpost of history and tourism for the area.

Each weekend, volunteers gather with their old axes and modern chain saws to chop and cut more of the iron-hard locust logs donated from a nearby development of high-dollar houses. The field yields an occasional clue to the history of the river valley. From a hole dug for the log gate comes a large arrowhead or spear point, hand knapped by Indians who hunted here hundreds or thousands of years ago.

As with the militia of 1776, more volunteers are raised over time. Curious people stop by to observe the work, and every now and then, one of them joins the group. Grants have been secured and more research is done.

With each log heaved into place, each hardwood peg driven into even harder wood, Old Fort gets a little closer to having a fort again, and becoming a destination for travelers heading deeper into the mountains and back into history.