Elisha Baker is granted 640 acres on the north side of the Holston River, beginning at the mouth of the first small creek below the mouth of the French Broad River, for a consideration of ten pounds per hundred acres. The grant is signed by Governor Richard Caswell and Secretary W. Williams.
Source: North Carolina land grant, Warrant No. 504, Grant No. 466, 20 Sept. 1787, Greene County.This is Baker's earliest and largest known Greene County holding, secured at the Holston/French Broad confluence — valuable river-access bottomland. The two 1793 grants that follow appear to expand outward from this original tract.
Narrowing the location
The confluence of the Holston and French Broad Rivers sits at a place still known today as "Forks of the River," at the eastern edge of Knoxville. A tract beginning at the mouth of the first small creek below the mouth of the French Broad, on the north side of the Holston, places Baker's original 640 acres just downstream — west — of that confluence, in the area later organized as Knox County (formed 1792) or immediately adjoining Jefferson County (also formed 1792, from Greene and Hawkins Counties).
A near-contemporary historian, Ramsey, notes that the district around this confluence, within original Greene County, was briefly organized as "Caswell County" under the short-lived State of Franklin government in 1785, before the region was reorganized under North Carolina and later the Southwest Territory — another instance of this specific ground changing jurisdictional names without Baker having moved.