Articles

Farming in Rabun County: Maize, Subsistence Farms and Moonshine

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

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Karl Wallenda’s Walk Across Tallulah Gorge-July 18, 1970

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.

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Clayton Business Advertisements in 1920

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

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Burton: The Town Under The Lake 

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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When Convicted Murderers Were Hung in Rabun County

 One said he could hear a rattling noise in his head. The other claimed he killed in self-defense.  These two men were the only convicted murderers ever hung in Rabun County.  Both hangings took place in Clayton more than a century ago. The first was held in the privacy of the jail. The second was

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