CANTON — Cherokee County’s role in the Trail of Tears will be highlighted next week in a program put on by the Cherokee County Historical Society. Author John W. Latty will discuss his book, “Carrying off the Cherokee: History of Buffington’s Company, Georgia Mounted Militia,” at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Rock Barn on Marietta Highway.

The event, free and open to the public, will give the author an opportunity to tell the story of Capt. Ezekiel Buffington’s Georgia Mounted Militia Company during the Cherokee Removal, which was part of the larger Trail of Tears.

The Trail of Tears was the forced removal of members of the Cherokee nation from their lands in Georgia and throughout the southeast.

Latty said he’d always been fascinated about Capt. Buffington’s company since his third great-grandfather was a member of his company, but “I didn’t know very much about it.”

The book also goes into the militia’s duty at New Echota and the building of Ft. Buffington in east Cherokee County during the Cherokee removal.

Latty notes the citizen soldiers stationed at Buffington were originally from Hall County, which was also part of the Cherokee nation’s land. He added these “men were committed to the settlement” to the growth of the lands.

Latty gave credit to him obtaining the information to the Trail of Tears Association, specifically historians Stephen Neal Dennis and Dr. Sarah Hill.

Dr. Hill compiled the Cherokee Removal: Forts Along the Georgia Trail of Tears research project for the U.S. National Park Service and the Georgia Department of Natural Resources’s Historic Preservation Division in 2005.

Latty noted Hill’s research project led him to “sources of information that I didn’t know about.”

Hill also connected Latty with Dennis, and he spent three weeks at the U.S. National Archives and Recordds Administation with Dennis’ guidance.

Together, the two carefully explored the archives and were able to discover hundreds of articles mentioning events surrounding the Native American Removal in North Georgia. “There were literally dozens of articles documenting the events that had never been discovered before, probably because no one has searched for them,” Latty said.

Utilizing those two resources helped him come up with enough information to write “this brief history.” For more information, contact the Cherokee County Historical Society at (770) 345-3288 or visit www.rockbarn.org.