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    Tragedy and Triumph: A North Georgia History Compendium
    Tragedy and Triumph: A North Georgia History Compendium
    Tragedy and Triumph: A North Georgia History Compendium
    Ebook210 pages1 hour

    Tragedy and Triumph: A North Georgia History Compendium

    By Christopher Feldt

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    About this ebook

    What we know and love as Pickens County was a magical place, literally from its physical beginnings. Located between chains of the oldest mountains in the world,

    some scenes there have changed little in many thousands of years, even when sabretooth tigers roamed this land....

     

    The past of this land and its people became as lost as its gold and silver mines, its prehistoric past, or even the origins of its most colorful names like Long Swamp, Price Creek, and Talking Rock. The late Reverend Charles O. Walker (1929-2010), once a newcomer to the area, began recovering that legacy in the 1960s and it is now carried on by people inspired by his work. 

     

    Chris Feldt now continues this great adventure in ways Charles would have loved.

     

    Be prepared on these pages to be amazed as well as entertained! But also, so much more.  Too many places have a history that exists only on paper in archives and books, beyond what can be physically experienced or felt. Chris not only reveals the heritage of this special place but shows that in Pickens County, William Faulkner's claim, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." is very true!

     

    Please take the time to savor the incredible work done here in your armchair journey to this incredible crossroads of times that have been, are, and will be!

    Pickens County is always worth any journey!

     

    Robert S. Davis

    Author and researcher who has made that trip.

     

    Robert Scott Davis has more than 2,000 publications dealing with genealogy, history, records, and research, most of which deal with the state of Georgia (USA) in some form or fashion. He has been widely quoted by or appeared in CNN, Time, Smithsonian, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherChristopher Feldt
    Release dateMar 1, 2024
    ISBN9798224676071
    Tragedy and Triumph: A North Georgia History Compendium
    Author

    Christopher Feldt

    Chris Feldt is a father, veteran, artist, writer, researcher, poet, composer, and history buff.  He moved with his daughter Aviana to North Georgia in 2018.   

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      Book preview

      Tragedy and Triumph - Christopher Feldt

      Part 1

      THE FIRST INHABITANTS

      Ancient Indian Rock Mounds

      High atop Rich Mountain there is a half-acre site with 97 stacks of Indian rock piles.

      A pile of rocks in the woods Description automatically generated
      Other Sites within Pickens County

      Pretribal Indians throughout North America had left remnants of their ceremonial sites in the forms of cairns. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, a cairn is large, conical heap of stone, especially of the type common in Scotland and Wales and also found elsewhere in Britain, 1530s, from Scottish carne, akin to Gaelic carn heap of stones, rocky hill and Gaulish karnon horn, perhaps from PIE *ker-n- highest part of the body, horn, thus tip, peak (see horn (n.)). Many of these sites are found in the northeastern part of our nation.

      There are examples in Pickens County as well. The most famous being found in Big Canoe at the Indian Rocks Park. Margaret Clayton Russell in 1970 researched the sites found near the location of the Spring that fills Lake Petit. Mrs. Russell determined most of the site to be comprised of archaic Indian artifacts and believed it to be several thousand years old.

      According to her research:

      Margaret Russell investigated two stone cairns from a cluster of 16 in a section of Pickens County, Georgia, two counties southeast of Murray County. Two other clusters of stone mounds were in the area and there they were located on the east upper slopes of two hills. No artifacts, features or recognizable chemical differences in the soil were found. The landowners had collected a few projectile points in low areas of the property and they fell within the Archaic period from about 7000-2000 B.C. Artifacts made of non-local chert included a small basally notched Eva point, a LeCroy Bifurcated point, a rounded base corner notched early Archaic form and a few flake tools. Items made of quartz, found locally, included a Dalton point, two Big Sandy points'; three crude triangular points and several later Archaic points.

      A lesser-known site still exists mostly undisturbed today near Sharp Mountain and Rich Mountain. On the side of a hill in a remote location of Pickens County there are 97 stacks of assembled field stones. In 1991, historian Robert Scott Davis, Jr. first wrote about this location in A North Georgia Journal of History Vol. II. These cairns have no apparent arrangement to the order of their placement on the land. Some piles are distributed in a flat arrangement and others are several feet high.

      The cairns from both sites look remarkably similar. Both cairn sites are near springs that fed creeks that were affiliated with more modern Indians. One spring was the source of Petit creek which ran near Wolfscratch Village. The other spring – the source of Scarecorn Creek, ran to the village at Murphy Bottoms (Located at the intersection of Scarecorn Creek and Jerusalem Church Road)

      A third site containing relics was located within the area now known as Bent Tree. In 1970, anthropologist Robert L. Blakely excavated over seventy sites, finding more than 50 artifacts. All the artifacts found within Bent Tree were from the archaic period and mostly made of quartz. Interestingly there were no examples of pottery found within Bent Tree. Pottery was a much later development within the Indian tribes.

      Most people aren’t aware of the earliest mention of a location named with present-day Pickens County. History has it that in 1779, General Andrew Pickens (the man for whom our county is named) and several of his soldiers went after the Sharp Mountain village (Cherokee) only to discover that their British agent, Alexander Cameron had escaped. The British had been collaborating with the Cherokee to fight the colonists. This mention of Sharp Mountain is one of the earliest recorded documents regarding Pickens County.

      Is it possible that the tribe mentioned in Pickens’ writing was the same tribe that resided along Scarecorn Creek? Is there a connection between the location of ceremonial sites being near important sources of water? Most Indians lived in alluvial planes and revered the sun and the water. Why not deem such sources of life sacred? Remarkably, these ancient sites are still beautifully preserved, thousands and thousands of years later, here in Pickens County.

      Murphy Bottom – The largest Native American
      Village Site of Pickens
      A map of a land Description automatically generated

      If you ask old-time residents of Pickens County, they'll tell you that Murphy Bottom off Jerusalem Church Road (near two branches of Scarecorn Creek) in West Pickens used to be the place to find arrowheads. Some people mention that a village may have been there at one time.

      Archaeology sites in Georgia are labeled in a pattern. This site was originally designated as 9 Pi 12. It also has the designator of 9 Pi 103. It has two designators because it was excavated twice.

      In 1956, a man named John Wear, an amateur archeologist from Fairmount excavated the site. He had found the usual suspects: grooved adzes, spades, flint points, checked stamped pottery, and fabric-marked pottery. More interestingly he discovered a refuse pit with burnt corn cobs. Archaic arrowhead points indicate that in the Late Archaic Period this was a great village. A high number of ceramics indicated that site was also occupied much later during the Middle and Late Woodland Periods.

      In other words, the Murphy Bottom site was the largest type of excavation of a village site in the county at the time. It helped to differentiate the settlement patterns between the higher mountain elevations and the floodplains. The absence of specific types of pottery and ceramics helped narrow the time range down.

      Village life waxed and waned from approximately 3000 BC through around 500 AD. Of course, this would indicate that this was not a Cherokee village nor a Creek village site. This was much earlier.

      Interestingly, as discerned from the extensive archaeologic data, the upper reaches of the Scarecorn Creek area (near Rich Mountain) were abandoned or infrequently visited from 1000 AD - 1850 AD.

      It should be noted that the original report written by Wear has been lost over time and the only references to it, those by Morse (1960) and Smith, Ledbetter, Wood (1988), etc. are the primary sources of this information.

      Long Swamp Town: The History and Origin of
      Long Swamp Creek
      A map of the united states Description automatically generated

      Archaeologist Robert Wauchope's Interpretation of the Mitchell Map

      The Mitchell map of 1755 was the first map to show Long Swamp as a place (albeit, under a different name). The map was compiled from the best sources of information at the time under the direction of the Second Earl of Halifax. The map remained one of the largest and most accurate depictions of North America through the 18th Century. At six and a half feet wide and four and a half feet high, it is a massive

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