This section of trail roughly parallels Bartram’s journey into the Little Tennessee River Valley. Bartram proceeded down valley after crossing the Eastern Continental Divide at modern day Mountain City, Georgia, travelling north on an ancient trade path. Bartram describes his journey out of Stekoe and across the Divide being on a path of very rough and stony ground. Today is US Highway 441, paved and four laned, and busy around the clock. He doesn’t mention crossing the Eastern Continental Divide, which is interesting, as the location was known as Herbert’s Savannah, and is noted as such on mid-18th century maps that Bartram would have likely seen. Herbert was Commissioner of Indian Affairs and traveled into the Little Tennessee Valley in the 18th century. Maps that show the Savannah in the 18th century indicate that it was significant, and over one hundred years later the Army Corps of Engineers would describe it as one of the most significant depressions in the entire Blue Ridge and planned to build a canal across it to connect the two watersheds that drained on either side of it. It held mythological significance as well, as the Cherokees believed that one particular spring draining into this unusual location produced enchanted water, and that the recipient of it would be held captive to the area for seven years. Indian trader James Adair describes the spring and this myth when passing through the area in 1755 and published his account of it in his History of the American Indian.
Water flowing into the savannah from the many springs in the mountains mingled in the large depression, which was likely flooded in part due to the large number of beavers that existed in the mountains at that time. 19th century travel writer Charles Lanman described the spring as the “place where the rivers shook hands,” a description he ostensibly gathered from a Cherokee man in north Georgia. One of southern Appalachia’s first women authors, Mary Noailles Murfree (1850-1922), included the spring as a central part of her fictional story Victory at Chungke, published in Harper’s magazine in March 1900.
Regardless, Bartram crosses the Divide and head into the upper Little Tennessee Valley where he describes the abandoned farms and ruins of Cherokee villages destroyed during two campaigns of the French and Indian War fought here, as well as piles of stones along his route – I observed on each side of the road many vast heaps of these stones, Indian graves undoubtedly…. Interestingly, the upper valley is still agricultural, with numerous roadside farms dotting the landscape, beginning at Rabun Gap, Georgia and on into Otto, North Carolina.
This landscape will not be the one you experience as you ascend the Eastern Continental Divide to Rabun Bald, Georgia’s second highest mountain at 4,696 feet. However, at Rabun Bald you will look directly into the Little Tennessee Valley to the west and see Scaly Mountain and the Fishhawk Range to the north. The Continental Divide, runs southwest to northeast in its geography, almost spanning the entire eastern United States, and as you hike this section keep in mind that water on the eastern side of the mountain range ultimately flows to the Atlantic Ocean and water on the west side is flowing into the Gulf of Mexico.
Rabun Bald sits within a 12,000-acre tract that was once owned by the lumberman Andrew Gennett. Gennett purchased this and other similarly sized tracts in Rabun County in 1907 for eight dollars an acre and logged a great deal of the Chattooga River watershed following these acquisitions. He also owned thousands of acres elsewhere in the north Georgia and western North Carolina mountains and sold most of these cutover tracts to the US Forest Service following the passage of the Weeks Act in 1911, which created an eastern National Forest system. Gennett was an avid journalist of his travels throughout the mountains, and his writings are full of interesting human interactions and logging tales. These were published under the title Sound Wormy: Memoir of Andrew Gennett, Lumberman (University of Georgia Press, 2007), thanks to the efforts of the editor of the collection, Nicole Hayer, who is also Executive Director of the Chattooga Conservancy.