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.