One of the first literate descriptions of Stone Mountain was written by the Rev. Francis R. Goulding, noted novelist and inventor, who spent his later years at Roswell, forty miles away. Goulding visited the mountain on June 25, 1822, as a 12-year-old, with his father, a cousin, a Cherokee guide named Kanooka, and a slave boy named Scipio. The elder Goulding, a prosperous merchant of Darien on the coast, had just recovered from a severe spell of fever and recuperated by taking his son to the mountains to visit with the Cherokees that summer. Young Francis wrote:
“Twenty miles away to the southeast a vast prominence of rock loomed in lonely grandeur above the horizon. It was the great natural curiosity of the neighborhood, of which we had often heard and which we had resolved to visit at our first opportunity. That time had now come. Indeed, the fame of the great rock had extended to the Old Country, and had there excited interest through the representation of a British officer who had visited and described it as early as the year 1788.
“At the time of our visit the country around had barely passed into the hands of the white man, and there were few roads and fewer houses of accommodation. Our tent was pitched beside a spring near the mountain’s base, around the north and west of which flows a pleasant stream. From this point the rock rose majestically, with an almost perpendicular face of a thousand feet. We enjoyed its rough grandeur almost as much by the soft light of the moon as we did by the red light of the setting sun.
“Taking an early breakfast the next morning, we made our way first to the eastern side of the mountain. Here the view was stupendous. A bare, hemispherical mass of solid granite rose before us to the height of two or three thousand feet, striped along its sides as if torn by lightning or ‘gullied’ by the action of water through countless ages.
“Our ascent was effected on the southwestern side, where the slope is comparatively easy and where the otherwise baldness of the rock is relieved by an occasional tuft of dwarfed cedars or stunted oaks, which find a root hold in the crevices. These trees, elevated a quarter of a mile above the surrounding level, seem to be a favorite resort for buzzards, many of which were wheeling in graceful flight in the air around, and a greater number which perched upon dead treetops, apparently resting from their labors and watching from the convenient height for objects on which they might feed in the level country below.
“We found the summit an irregularly flat oval about a furlong in length. The view from it was superb. Not another mountain could be seen in any direction within a distance of twenty-five or thirty miles. The country all around seemed to be an immense level, or rather a basin, the rim of which rose on all sides to meet the blue of the sky. To the east and south appeared a few clearings, but in every other direction the forest was unbroken.
“Encircling the summit, at a distance of nearly a quarter of a mile from its center, was a remarkable wall, about breast high, built of loose, fragmentary stone, and evidently meant for a military fortification; but when erected, and by whom, we could not learn. Kanooka said that it was there when his people first came, and that they knew no more of it than we did. In some places the stones were almost all dislodged by persons who had rolled them down the steep declivity but there were enough remaining to show that the wall had once been continuous all around the summit, and that the only place of entrance was by a natural doorway under a large rock, so narrow and so low that only one man could enter at a time, by crawling on his hands and knees.”
Carver Roy Faulkner working with the small finishing torch. Notice the fine detail in General Lee’s features and the sweep of his famous white beard.
