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.