Appalachian History

Sometimes, you see something and it's so far removed from what you expected, that all you can mutter is, "Huh?"

That was my reaction, the first time I hiked back through the woods, to see "The Wall" at Fort Mountain State Park, atop Fort Mountain, just east of Chatsworth, Georgia. It’s part of the Chattahoochee National Forest, close to the Cohutta Wilderness area, at the southwestern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The park and mountain gets its name from a mysterious stone wall that's been sitting on top of the mountain since before the Cherokee moved into the region. It's built without mortar and made from large non-native rocks. It’s 855 feet long and varies from 2 to 6 feet in height. It runs east to west and lines up with the Winter Solstice. And, the Native Americans who were there before the Cherokee claimed it was built by moon-eyed people.

Feel free to cue up "The Twilight Zone" music.

I'm a lifelong military history buff and I can't, for the life of me, see any defensive application to the structure. It's sitting in the middle of the woods. That's just not how forest fighting is done.

It has what looks like pods, for lack of a better term, kind of like stone foxholes. Or, maybe they were used as a base for beams for a larger structure. One theory is that honeymooners spent the night in the pods.

I don’t know.

The whole thing baffles me and everyone who visits it.

The best archeological guess is that it was built between 500 B.C. and 1500 A.D., with the highest probability that it was built around 500 A.D. One leading theory is that the moon-eyed people were followers of Prince Madoc, a Welsh adventurer who showed up in Mobile Bay around 1400 A.D. and presumably moved north. Some petroglyphs support the legend, but apparently there is nothing conclusive, yet.

And, it just sits there, mocking us, defying everything we think we know about pre-Columbian history. It sits quietly, serenely, not really caring whether we figure it out or not.

That's why I call it The Poor Man's Stonehenge. It's just as mysterious. It raises just as many questions. It's just as mesmerizing. It just hasn't had the hype.

It's one of North Georgia's best kept secrets, in more ways than one.

TWH

[Sources: http://www.gastateparks.org/info/fortmt/; http://ngeorgia.com/ang/Fort_Mountain_State_Park]


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Deer hunting season got underway in Georgia this past weekend. It’s all too easy to forget that in the early part of the 20th century, there simply were no deer to be had in the northern part of the state. Arthur Woody never forgot that, and today’s hunters in Appalachian Georgia owe him a debt of thanks.

Arthur “Kingfish” Woody (1884-1946), served the U.S. Forestry Service from 1911 to 1945, starting out as a surveyor. In 1918 the Federal Government combined various local land holdings into the Cherokee National Forest, part of which extended into North Georgia. A short time later additional land the government purchased was consolidated with portions of the Cherokee into the Georgia National Forest (later renamed the Chattahoochee National Forest) and Woody became the Blue Ridge District’s first Forest Ranger. The district was the first wildlife management area in the South.

In the midst of the depression the CCC began to improve the area around Suches, GA thanks to efforts by “the barefoot ranger,” and he was responsible for the original proposal for a Visitor’s Center at Brasstown Bald.

At the time of Woody’s birth, deer habitat was under tremendous pressure: much of the Georgia mountains had been stripped bare by lumber companies that found it cheaper to simply leave land they’d cleared rather than replant. Woody had gone with his father John on a hunting trip in 1895 when he was a boy, and claimed his dad killed the last deer anywhere in the North Georgia.

"I vowed I would remedy that situation when I was grown," Woody later told Charlie Elliot, former commissioner of the State Game Commission. In 1927 he started restocking deer in the North Georgia mountains with much of his own money, while managing to raise some money from the U.S. Forest Service. He purchased whitetail deer from a passing show and rounded up more in the mountains of western North Carolina, releasing them in an area near the park headquarters of Rock Creek.

He named many of them. One old buck was named Old Nemo. He had names for others. Finally, the deer did multiply and the state re-opened hunting season in 1941. Among the landmarks in the Chattahoochee National Forest honoring Woody is a trail through the Sosebee Cove, a 175-acre tract of prize hardwood Woody purchased for the Forest Service that is now part of the Brasstown Ranger District.


Sources: http://ngeorgia.com/people/woody.html
http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~woodygap/arthur1.htm
www.unioncountyhistory.org/page58/page7/page7.html
www.unionsentinel.com/news/2007/0315/Front_Page/004.html


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