Colorful flowers on Stone Mountain.
A field of Viguiera porteri, or Confederate daisies.
White milkweed, Asclepeas variegata.
Rare Hypericum splendens.
Evening primrose, Oenothera fruticosa.
Rosa Carolinia.
Practically every square foot of exposed granite is covered with lichens or mosses.
All the mountain’s early visitors were intrigued by the pre-historic wall. Some thought de Soto might have had it built, without considering that the aim of the conquistadores was to find treasure, grab it and run. They were not interested in defensive strongholds, and certainly not in building one that would entail carrying thousands of tons of rock up a steep mountain. All the early writers described the wall as a cleverly contrived fortress, since it blocked all trails leading to the summit. However, the most ignorant savage certainly would have realized that the top of Stone Mountain would be untenable in a siege, since there was no water and no access to food. It is the last place anyone would want to be caught when shooting started.
Most likely, the wall had some religious or ceremonial significance. Toting rocks and stacking them in a line is the kind of project ancient medicine men liked to think up to keep their tribesmen occupied, like building the great mounds throughout the South and down into Mexico and South America. Even today it is not hard to visualize weirdly painted warriors climbing the mountain in a torchlight procession and dancing all night around a roaring fire at the top. Consider, too, the old medicine men’s penchant for human sacrifice. At dawn the frenzied crowd probably hurled some luckless victim over the rim, while the women and children, who had waited below all night to see the poor devil fall, screamed and cheered, feeling sure that the gods would be so happy about the whole thing that they would assure bountiful crops and good hunting.
Another stone wall stands atop Fort Mountain overlooking Chatsworth, a hundred miles to the northwest, and it, too, is built at the edge of a high precipice.
The Stone Mountain wall must have contained millions of rocks, for there were enough to let men and boys test their muscles by rolling stones off the mountain for more than a hundred years, until Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, had the last ones thrown off in 1923 to make sure vandals did not start them rolling down among his workmen.
A feature on the mountain top surely as impressive as the great wall was the Devil’s Cross Roads. This was a tremendous flat boulder roughly two hundred feet across and five to ten feet thick, cleft by two smooth, straight breaks making avenues four feet wide, one running directly north and south, the other east and west. They joined at right angles at the center, and directly over this juncture was another flat rock twenty feet in diameter.
The Cross Roads became a favorite spot to have breakfast for parties who climbed the mountain to watch the sunrise. And everybody wondered that nature could make a compass as accurate and a great deal more spectacular than the ancient Egyptians could do. The entire formation disappeared in 1896 when quarrymen found that it was composed of superior building stone and broke it up and let it down the mountain by winches.
DeKalb County was founded Dec. 9, 1822.
The DeKalb County courthouse in Decatur burned in 1842, destroying most of the early deeds that were on record. There are some interesting legends concerning early ownership which, because of the destroyed documents, can neither be proved nor disproved.
Perhaps the first white settler to claim ownership of the mountain was John W. Beauchamp. His descendants still tell how their great-great-great-grandpa gave Indians forty dollars and a pony worth about fifty dollars for the big rock. They say he traded it to Andrew Johnson and Aaron Cloud for a muzzle-loading gun and twenty dollars. There are legends that a jug of whiskey figured in both deals.
If Beauchamp received or gave a bill of sale, it has not come to light in recent years. He never explained how the Indians got their claim to the property. It may have been a sudden inspiration, conjured up at sight of the jug. No formal deed could have been available, since the whole area was still in public domain.
In 1822, the year Francis Goulding explored the mountain, the State Legislature prepared the original land grants. The mountain lay in seven different land lots, which apparently were awarded to veterans of the Revolutionary War. One lot went to the orphans of a veteran.
It is said that a man in Athens was awarded one of the grants. He walked the sixty miles or so to the mountain to examine his property, and seeing that most of it was bare rock, he swapped it for a mule to ride home.
Andrew Johnson, who already had a shotgun claim to the mountain, was not one of those receiving grants, but he acquired bona fide title to considerable land at the base and also the main slice of the mountain in time to build an inn, about where the Administration Building is now, when the stage coach line came through in 1825. The stage ran from the capital at Milledgeville by Eatonton and Covington to Stone Mountain, then on by Winder to Athens where the oldest chartered State University was already dispensing higher education.
Discovery of gold in the Dahlonega and Gainesville area in 1828, the first deposits found north of Mexico, brought a boom in traffic and another stage line from Stone Mountain to the gold fields. Fare was ten cents a mile, and since distances were great, the business must have been profitable.
Everybody bent on mining gold had to pass Stone Mountain, and any coming back, with or without new riches, stopped there again. Aaron Cloud, Johnson’s partner in the shotgun deal, built another inn to take care of the overflow. A town calling itself New Gibraltar grew up around the taverns, with general stores, a blacksmith shop and other services for the traveling public and the growing farm population.
In that era of typhoid, chronic malaria and yellow fever epidemics, prosperous planters and merchants in the lowlands sent their families to the mountains during the “summer miasmas”—the fly and mosquito seasons we realize now—and the most enjoyable part of the trip each way was the stopover of a day or two at Stone Mountain to climb the great rock and unlimber kinks caused by days of rough bouncing in stagecoach or carriage.
Aaron Cloud was the first to establish a tourist attraction. In 1838 he paid Andrew Johnson $100 for “150 feet square” at the highest point on the mountain, where he erected a tower 165 feet tall, appropriately called Cloud’s Tower. For fifty cents a visitor who already had winded himself reaching the summit could climb another 300 steps and get a still higher view.
William C. Richards, a correspondent for “Georgia Illustrated,” published in Macon, wrote in 1842:
“This singular edifice, resembling somewhat a lighthouse, is an octagonal pyramid built entirely of wood. It stands upon the rock with no fastening but its own gravity. It was built nearly three years ago at a cost of $5,000. The projector and proprietor is Mr. Aaron Cloud of McDonough, and the work is commonly called Cloud’s Tower.
“In the lower part is a hall one hundred feet square fitted up for the accommodation of parties.
“We ascended by nearly 300 steps. The eyes rest upon a continuity of forest. The plantations and settlements appear small amid the sea of foliage. By the aid of good telescopes we distinguished five county towns. Among the towns I located was Terminus, a few straggling huts beyond Decatur.”
While the 150-foot-square plat cost $100, another old deed shows that Cloud paid Johnson only $260 for 101½ acres of good forest land at the foot of the mountain.
Another enterprising showman operated sometime in the Roaring Forties. His name has been lost, but some of the work he did can still be seen. He cut a trail for 250 feet, high up along the steep face extending out from the Buzzard’s Roost, installed an iron railing, and charged anyone who had the courage for such an adventure twenty-five cents to walk gingerly out to the end and back.
These boulders guard the approach to Buzzard’s Roost, a grove of gnarled pines near the top. Stone Mountain’s only airplane crash occurred in this area.
Broken ledges and scattered blocks of stone show where granite was quarried.
A coach was left when the Stone Mountain railway was abandoned.
In one respect the fellow was a hundred years ahead of his time. He solved the traffic problem completely. Since only one person could go out at a time, there was never a jam or collision. But ambition was his undoing. While extending his trail still farther he blew himself into oblivion with a premature explosion of blasting powder.
Correspondent Richards especially mentioned Terminus as one of the places he could see through Cloud’s telescope because the magic new town was very much in the news. In 1842 engineers had just completed a survey to establish the northernmost route a railroad could be built from Augusta, the head of navigation on the Savannah River, around the Blue Ridge Mountains and on to Chattanooga, a growing steamboat town on the Tennessee.
Terminus had been renamed Marthasville and then Atlanta by the time the first train came over the line in 1845. Most of the town’s leading citizens were waiting at Stone Mountain to board it for a triumphal ride into their new city.
The railroad had suddenly become so much more important than the stage line that New Gibraltar moved over beside the tracks. In 1847 the legislature granted the town a charter as Stone Mountain and also gave the granite knoll, which had been called Rock Mountain and Stony Mountain, the official name of Stone Mountain. That year a spur track was built from the depot out to a point between the two inns operated by Andrew Johnson and Aaron Cloud.
Another historic event took place on that first train ride from Stone Mountain to Atlanta, in 1845. The local leaders discussed organizing an agricultural society to promote better farming and merchandising methods. The first meeting of the South Central Agricultural Society was held at the mountain in 1846, with 61 charter members. The following year the Society held a fair at Stone Mountain. A Savannah reporter, covering the event for his paper, wrote: “Wagons, carriages, carts and pedestrians are arriving every minute. Ladies form a very large proportion.” The correspondent’s concluding notation, that he slept in a room with twenty-eight other people, explains why the fair was held at Stone Mountain only two seasons. It was moved to more populous Atlanta and grew into the great Southeastern Fair, while the society evolved into the Georgia Department of Agriculture.
The Civil War touched Stone Mountain to the extent that the flow of tourists stopped, and a detachment of Union cavalry swooped in and burned most of the town, sending up columns to join the smoke from Atlanta, Decatur and other unfortunate neighbors.
Stone Mountain’s granite, being too heavy for long hauls by wagon, had no commercial value whatever until the coming of the railroad. The spur line built in 1847 surely hauled rock as well as tourists. The first official mention of the granite industry appears on a deed filed in 1863, when W. B. Wood and John J. Meador sold a parcel of land, but reserved quarrying rights.
In the Reconstruction Period, when Southern industry was at its lowest ebb, the granite quarries flourished. Growing towns needed paving blocks and curb stones. Buildings destroyed in the war had to be replaced. William H. and Samuel H. Venable, as the Venable Brothers, expanded until they had acquired the entire mountain in 1887, estimating that altogether it cost them $48,000. The firm operated for seventy more years, extending the railroad line around to the east side, where the finest stone was found.
Stone Mountain granite paved principal streets in most of the Southeastern towns. At the height of their operation, the quarries were turning out 200,000 paving blocks and 2,000 feet of curbing a day. In addition, building stones went into the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, the famous Fulton Tower jail, many post offices, courthouses, warehouses, and commercial buildings, into the foundations of skyscrapers, to Panama for the canal locks; and tremendous blocks of granite were shipped to the seacoasts from Charleston to New Orleans for breakwaters.
Will T. Venable, who grew up in the house nearest the steep side of the mountain, told the writer of his boyhood there in the eighties for an article published sixty years later.
“The rarest sight is a rainbow on the mountain’s face,” Mr. Venable said. “I have seen but two or three in my lifetime. They can only appear very early in the morning, since the big rock faces to the north. The bow always starts on the ground, climbs the mountain and disappears on top. It almost makes you believe you might find a pot of gold up there.
“When it rains, the side of the mountain looks like a waterfall. The water turns into foam and literally bubbles down. When I was a youngster we used to hang our clothes on convenient limbs and stand under the falls for a foam bath. It was pleasant while you were taking it, but when you dried off, you found yourself covered with very fine, hard sand, which itched like the mischief. As you look at the side of the mountain, you see the courses taken by the water as it pours off. A close-up shows that the water has eroded little ditches two or three inches deep.
“The greatest show we ever had was the work on the carving,” Mr. Venable continued. “If you have ever stood fascinated while a steam shovel dug a hole in flat ground, maybe you can imagine how the work on the mountain kept us entertained.”
An incident odd enough to be typical of Stone Mountain’s history took place in 1928, just after air mail was inaugurated. Little single-seated biplanes gave overnight service between Atlanta and New York, at a period when night-flying instruments were few and crude, and Stone Mountain lay directly in the path of flight. At the pilots’ insistence, a contractor was commissioned to erect a safety light on top.
Lady fire watchers had an exciting Jeep ride and a long climb to the old tower.
Newspapers and visitors took note of the laborious work of carrying steel poles and wire up the steep trail, then nothing more was said or seen of the light until one dark night several weeks later Pilot Johnny Kytle’s plane smashed itself and nine bags of mail helter skelter up the steep slope, arousing neighbors for miles around. The Atlanta postmaster was among those who rushed to the mountain to help Johnny and his load of mail back to town.
Then an investigation was launched, to determine why there was no light on the mountain. The foreman on the job brought out his work sheet, showing how he had checked off each item—the poles, bolts and braces, the insulators, the wire, the socket, and the final item, he had turned on the electricity. But the list given him had contained no mention of a light bulb, so he had not screwed one in!
Until the new recreation hall and observation tower were erected the only construction on top of the mountain in recent years was a 60-foot-high forest fire-watcher’s tower, manned consecutively by two women. They drove up every morning and down in the evening along the foot trail by Jeep before any semblance of a road was made, and never had a mishap. If a thundercloud approached, they came down in a hurry, to reach the bottom before the storm bombarded the mountain with lightning.
This photo shows Elias Nour actually rescuing a dog that slid part way down the mountain.
Night watching was done by men of the county fire department, and they made it a point to go up before sundown and return after dawn. Trying to come down the mountain at night is a fearsome experience, say those who have done it. Every direction looks the same, and the horizon is just a few yards away, since the rock curves off into space.
The man most closely associated with Stone Mountain in recent years is Elias Nour, whose family operated a restaurant near the foot of the east trail. When Elias was thirteen he let himself be lowered at the end of a rope to rescue a boy who had slipped over the crest and was clinging for his life to a tiny depression in the rock. Since then he has rescued thirty-three more persons who ventured so far down the mountainside that they could not climb back.
A peculiar thing, he noted, is that hardly any of the people he saved ever bothered to thank him. Mostly they seemed embarrassed at having got themselves into such a predicament, and they also appeared to think that saving lives was part of his duties. An exception was a large dog, that clung whining to the rock until young Nour reached his side. The dog behaved perfectly while they were being hauled to safety. Once on top he jumped upon Mr. Nour so suddenly that he knocked him down, then licked his face and neck thoroughly before he was pulled away.
There is no record of the number who have fallen to their deaths at Stone Mountain, but it probably is far over a hundred. Some no doubt were suicides, but the great majority were innocent victims of the mountain’s treachery. The great dome rounds off so smoothly, and the curve downward increases so gradually that the too-venturesome explorer does not realize he is in trouble until he begins to slide, or attempts to climb back up. Then he is fortunate indeed if he can find a tiny crevice or slight depression that he can cling to until help comes down to him from above.
One of the first acts of the new Stone Mountain Memorial Association was to erect a steel storm fence around the rim of the mountain, probably about the same location as the ancient rock wall, as a grim warning that venturing farther would be courting disaster.