By 1959, the Tallulah Falls Railroad was nearing the end of its run that began in 1887. Passenger service had long since been discontinued. Freight traffic was anemic. Debt in the millions of dollars was piling up. While the TF was still running, a writer for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution Magazine took what he
When Rabun County was founded in 1819, the local supermarket was the family farm. People ate the vegetables they grew, the animals they raised, the game they hunted and the fish they caught. Surviving in the isolated mountains of northeast Georgia was no easy task. Pork, squirrel and venison were favorite meats. Vegetables were eaten
Geography is a key factor shaping the development of a country or region. As an island nation, England turned to the ocean and became the world’s greatest maritime power by the eighteenth century. American pioneers saw the endless flat expanses of the Great Plains and turned it into the country’s breadbasket. On a still smaller
Franklin Delano Roosevelt assumed the U.S. presidency in 1933 at the depth of the Great Depression. National unemployment stood at a staggering 25%. FDR’s landslide election was a plea for help from a desperate and demoralized nation. Upon being sworn into office on March 4, 1933, FDR launched what became known as “The Hundred Days,”
Rabun County built four courthouses between 1824 and 1908 even though the county was sparsely populated, poor and isolated from the world. One more went up in the mid-1960s. This total does not include the oak tree that served as the county’s first hall of justice. When Rabun was established in 1819, the population of
Rabun County was remote and isolated, populated by subsistence farmers scratching out a living on hardscrabble mountain land. The Tallulah Falls Railroad opened Rabun and the surrounding region to the outside world. The TF also brought badly needed jobs. Working on the TF involved backbreaking labor for paltry wages, typically about one dollar per day.
Corn has been the main crop of Rabun County farmers since the first white settlers arrived over 200 years ago. Gristmills were built by Rabun farmers to grind the county’s corn harvests into meal for bread, grits and hominy. The output from gristmills also was used for something more potent than Johnnycakes. Virtually every Rabun
The earliest white settlers, Scots-Irish from Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina, arrived in northeast Georgia in the late eighteenth century. They farmed the land to survive, but those settlers were not the first to raise crops in the fertile valleys and river bottomlands of what would become Rabun County. Already living in the north Georgia
Rabun County is host to four houses on the National Register of Historic Places. Two became inns, or boardinghouses as they once were called, as a direct result of the Tallulah Falls Railroad. One is a farmhouse, serving as a vivid reminder of how poor, subsistence farmers lived in the Georgia mountains in the late
Mountain City’s history is entwined with a Native American legend and a sheriff who saw the lucrative potential of a railroad. Our story starts centuries ago in the time of Notla, son of a Cherokee chief, who wanted to marry Hiawassee, daughter of a Catawba chief. Hiawassee’s father, who had no love for the Cherokees,
A Rabun County mountain man from Tiger, Thomas E. Roane was not an electrical engineer. In fact, he had no college education at all. But that did not stop him from engineering and building the first power generating system to bring electricity to Clayton back in 1914. That was the same year Georgia Railway and
Clayton was barely a speck on the map. The few roads that existed were no more than old Cherokee trails. People caught vast numbers of jumping fish in baskets. An encyclopedic work published in 1849 provides a detailed snapshot of life in a rugged, remote and sparsely populated Rabun County within 30 years of its
Impassable roads (where roads even existed) and isolated communities shaped the development of Rabun County’s postal system in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the absence of decent roads, post offices had to be located within easy reach of the county’s many small communities. A round trip by horse and buggy from Rabun Gap
Only seven teachers had a tenth grade education. Schools lacked desks, books charts and maps. Many children were unable to comprehend what they read. School buildings were in varying states of disrepair. This snapshot of Rabun County’s 29 community schools emerged in 1914 when Georgia undertook a survey to assess the quality of education in
The railroad lost money practically every year from its inception in 1897. Collapsing wooden trestles plunged trains into deep ravines. Its wood-burning steam engines were antiquated. Many locals dubbed the Tallulah Falls Railroad the “Total Failure.” But the importance of the TFRR is inestimable. Northeast Georgia had few passable roads by the late 1800s. The
It was a grand vision of economic development cut short by the Civil War. That is the story of the Blue Ridge Railroad. No freight cars ever ran through its roadbed and long tunnels, the remnants of which are still visible in Rabun County and South Carolina. The Blue Ridge was never completed, making Rabun
The Day 50 Years Ago When Karl Wallenda Walked a Tightrope Across Tallulah Gorge (But He Wasn’t the First) By Richard Cinquina How do you revive interest in a resort town featuring spectacular waterfalls plunging through a 750-foot-deep gorge? Why, obviously, you would hire a 65-year-old daredevil to walk across the gorge on a tightrope.
Buggy Repairs, Flavo Flour and Hotel Rooms with Sewerage: Clayton Business Advertisements in 1920 By Richard Cinquina Described as a ramshackle town in the early 1900s, Clayton had attained a degree of prosperity by 1920. Overall conditions had improved significantly from the village’s poverty and neglect at the advent of the twentieth century. Tourists, courtesy
When executives of an Atlanta electric utility peered into Tallulah Gorge in 1909, they quickly saw the answer to their problem. A growing Atlanta was hungry for electricity. The Tallulah River roaring through the gorge would power a hydroelectric generating plant. Every kilowatt of that electricity would be transmitted to Atlanta. Problem solved. However, an
On a moonlit night on Lake Burton, some say you might hear the pealing of a church bell. It would not be coming from a nearby church. Rather, the mournful tolling is said to be an echo from 100 years distant when that bell was ringing in Burton, the town that lays submerged under the
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Clayton, Georgia 30525
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