In 1783, following the lead of Virginia in the case of Transylvania, North Carolina declared the Transylvania Company's purchase void, but granted the company in compensation a tract of one hundred and ninety thousand acres in Powell's Valley.

As compensation, the grants of North Carolina and Virginia were quite inadequate, considering the value of the service in behalf of permanent western colonization rendered by the Transylvania company.
James Robertson was chosen as presiding officer of the court of twelve commissioners, and was also elected commander-in-chief of the military forces of the eight little associated settlements on the Cumberland.

Here for the next two years the self-reliant settlers under Robertson's wise and able leadership successfully repelled the Indians in their guerrilla warfare, firmly entrenched themselves in their forest-girt stronghold, and vindicated their claim to the territory by right of occupation and conquest.

Here sprang up in later times a great and populous city--named, strangely enough, neither for Henderson, the founder, nor for Robertson and Donelson, the leaders of the two colonizing parties, but for one having no association with its history or origins, the gallant North Carolinian, General Francis Nash, who was killed at the Battle of Germantown..