Editing Elizabethton, Tennessee (section)

====Overmountain Men Muster for the Battle of Kings Mountain====

The Overmountain Men serving under Col. [[Isaac Shelby]] (who years earlier had worked as a surveyor for the Transylvania Company) and other patriot forces engaged and defeated a larger force of British Loyalists on August 19, 1780, at the [[Battle of Musgrove Mill]] near present-day [[Clinton, South Carolina]]. Fort Watauga later served as the September 26, 1780,<ref name="autogenerated2">[http://www.nps.gov/archive/ovvi/tn/travelog.htm U.S. National Park Service.]</ref> staging area for a much larger contingent of some 1,100 [[Overmountain Men]] who were preparing to trek over the [[Blue Ridge Mountains]] at [[Roan Mountain (Roan Highlands)|Roan Mountain]] to engage, and subsequently defeat, the British Army [[Loyalist (American Revolution)|Loyalist]] forces at the [[Battle of Kings Mountain]] in rural [[York County, South Carolina]], {{convert|9|mi|0}} south of the present-day town of [[Kings Mountain, North Carolina]].

Prior to the [[American Revolutionary War]] very little [[gunpowder]] had been made in the colonies, and most was imported from [[Kingdom of Great Britain|Britain]].<ref name="brown">Brown, ''The Big Bang: A History of Explosives'', p?</ref>{{Page needed|date=September 2010}} In October 1777, the [[Parliament of the United Kingdom|British Parliament]] banned the importation of gunpowder into the American colonies. In preparation for the overmountain march, five hundred pounds of [[black powder]] was manufactured for the Overmountain Men by Mary Patton and her husband at their Gap Creek powder mill. The Overmountain Men stored the Patton black powder on the rainy first night of their march in a dry cave known as the Shelving Rock that is located near [[Roan Mountain State Park]] at present-day [[Roan Mountain, Tennessee]].<ref name="autogenerated2" /> During January 1781, the Overmountain Men also fought the British at the [[Battle of Cowpens]] in South Carolina.