Chief carver Roy Faulkner at work on the Stone Mountain Memorial
Carving, face of General Robert E. Lee.
Georgia’s Stone Mountain
by Willard Neal
$2.00
[Illustration: This is a view of Stone Mountain before the carving.]
FOREWORD
Every traveler, on first viewing Stone Mountain, has stood in awe at the
foot of the looming monolith. Seasoned tourists and Georgia school
children are affected just as pioneer explorers were. The towering rock
is so impressive that each individual feels he is making the great
discovery.
Questions arise. How did Stone Mountain come to be? How old is it, and
how high? Exactly how large is this biggest carving in the world. How
was it done? Who did it? Who first saw Stone Mountain? What effects has
it had on the development of our country?
Thus, this book. It is dedicated to those who care enough to see and
study the wonders of their country, and who, in their travels, have had
the unexplainable and unexpected thrill of discovering Stone Mountain.
CARVING
[Illustration: Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Generals
Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson ride forever on Stone Mountain.]
_Stone Mountain’s Confederate Memorial is the world’s largest piece of
sculpture, cut into the side of the world’s biggest exposed mass of
granite. The carving is 90 feet tall and 190 feet wide, stands eleven
and a half feet out from the side of the mountain, and towers 400 feet
above the ground in a frame that is 360 feet square, or three acres.
Fifty-five years elapsed from the time of the original concept in 1915
until completion of the three figures in 1970. Not a blow of the hammer
was struck for 36 years, from 1928 to 1964._
At Stone Mountain things have a way of coming out quite differently than
planned.
History is a little hazy on who first envisioned a Confederate Memorial
on Stone Mountain. Mrs. Helen Plane, charter member of the United
Daughters of the Confederacy, was quoted in 1909 as thinking it would be
a fine place for a monument. In 1912 John Temple Graves, editor of the
New York American, after a visit back home wrote a rousing editorial for
the Atlanta Georgian urging that the world’s greatest monument be carved
on the world’s finest piece of stone.
Actual movement began in 1915 when Mrs. Plane, then president of the
Atlanta chapter of UDC, suggested having a 70-foot statue of General
Robert E. Lee carved on the steep side of the mountain. The UDC
consulted Gutzon Borglum, who just then was being acclaimed for his
statue of Abraham Lincoln. The first look at Stone Mountain set
Borglum’s imagination afire. Here was the biggest, finest solid block of
granite any sculptor ever had an opportunity to carve. A small figure in
its center, he pointed out, would be like a postage stamp stuck on a
barn.
The sculptor stayed several weeks at the nearby home of Samuel H.
Venable, head of the family that owned the mountain, while he studied
the great stone. Then he drew up sketches of Confederate leaders riding
around the mountain, which he submitted to a meeting of the UDC.
In 1915 women were not even permitted to vote. Their principal
commercial experience was as salesladies, telephone girls and
seamstresses. When Borglum said the monument would require ten years and
cost three million dollars, the ladies were terrified. They wanted no
part of such an undertaking.
On March 20, 1916, Sam Venable, Mrs. Coribel Venable Kellogg and Mrs.
Robert Venable Roper deeded the face of Stone Mountain and ten adjoining
acres to the UDC, with the proviso that the property would be turned
back to the original owners if a suitable monument was not completed in
twelve years. At their Chattanooga convention in 1917 the UDC ladies
founded an independent chartered organization known as the Stone
Mountain Confederate Monumental Association to manage the project.
World War I stopped non-essential activities. In 1923 Borglum announced
that his designs were complete and he was ready to start carving.
The world’s largest sculpture presented many unprecedented problems. A
difficult one was how to get a sketch of the monument on the
mountainside. Borglum announced that he would pour chemicals from above
to coat the stone with photographic emulsion, flash an image of his
model through a giant enlarger, and develop the picture by pouring down
more chemicals. By the time photographers explained to him that it could
not be done, his plan had been described in magazines and newspapers
around the world, and the Stone Mountain Memorial was news everywhere.
Borglum devised a method for using the idea, anyway.
There was not even a precedent for determining the size of the carving.
The nearest thing was the rule that decreed the diameter of court house
clocks. By this scale the statues should be 35 feet high for viewing
from the studio 1,300 feet away.
A crowd collected the evening the projector was set up. Borglum computed
the lens setting to give a 35-foot-tall image, inserted the plate
bearing a photograph of his model, and switched on the light. There was
a gasp from the spectators. Horses and men looked like midgets.
Borglum enlarged the image until it assumed an impressive size, then
called to two men, swinging down the mountain in bos’n’s chairs, to
measure it. One dangled a tape from the top. The other, reading the
figure at the bottom, called out, “One hundred and sixty-eight feet!”
[Illustration: Gutzon Borglum with his famous projector, and in the
studio with his model.]
[Illustration: ... and in the studio.]
[Illustration: Oxen hauled timbers up the mountain for the
stairway.]
[Illustration: Visitors arriving the day carving was begun in June,
1923.]
The men carried buckets of paint and brushes for outlining the picture;
but when they started to work they could not tell men from horses nor
heads from feet, or where one figure ended and another began. The next
day Borglum traced the picture of his model as a line drawing on another
plate and that night his aides were able to outline the sketch.
Motor trucks of that period were not powerful enough to climb Stone
Mountain. Materials needed to construct a stairway from the top down to
the carving site were hauled up the foot trail by ox cart. After the
stairs were finished, cable, pulley and winch were installed to bring up
materials for stairs down to the ground, scaffolding and tools.
On June 23, 1923, Borglum led a group of dignitaries over the top of the
mountain and down to the platform above the carving site. Gov. E. Lee
Trinkle of Virginia made a dedicatory speech through a megaphone to
throngs below. Then Borglum had himself lowered by bos’n’s chair and,
with a pneumatic drill, punched several holes into the mountain as the
official beginning of the carving.
[Illustration: Notables at lunch the day before Lee’s birthday in
1924.]
[Illustration: Borglum’s carvers at work.]
[Illustration: Smoke descends with rock after a powder blast.]
From the time he started, Borglum had five years to complete the
monument before the end of the 12-year deadline. On January 19, 1924,
anniversary of Lee’s birth, 20,000 gathered for the unveiling of General
Lee’s head. On the previous day a select party, including the governors
of Virginia, Texas and Alabama, had climbed over the mountain and
descended the stairs for a dinner at a table set up on the granite shelf
in front of the statue.
A few months later work on the carving began to slow down. Personality
rifts between Borglum and members of the Association widened, and in
March, 1925, the sculptor destroyed his models and sketches, and left
Georgia. Other artists said the real reason for his tantrums was
distortion in the carving—he never could have finished it, and he was
trying to hide the blame. Taking a short cut in projecting his sketch
onto the mountain had been a fatal mistake. He went to South Dakota and
gained lasting fame by carving the Mount Rushmore masterpiece.
No sign of Borglum’s work remains at Stone Mountain. However, he made a
vital contribution. It is doubtful if any other artist would have had
the imagination to visualize such a stupendous monument in such an
inaccessible place, or have had the nerve to start carving it.
And he accomplished one thing that lasts. He designed the Confederate
half-dollar. Congress agreed for the mint to produce five million of
these coins, which, with the Association selling them for a dollar
apiece, could have financed the carving of the memorial.
The next sculptor selected, Augustus Lukeman, was the exact antithesis
of his predecessor—a man of few words and apparently no temperament
whatever.
[Illustration: Augustus Lukeman inspecting work on Lee’s face. Note
white model at left.]
Starting April 1, 1925, Lukeman knew he could never complete the
memorial before the 12-year contract would expire in 1928. His hope was
to get enough done to show that he could and would finish it. So he
worked at top speed. Lukeman made a new design in classic style showing
President Jefferson Davis, General Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant General
Stonewall Jackson on horseback as the central figures, followed by an
army apparently marching out of the solid rock. His master model was on
a scale of 12-to-1—one inch on the model corresponded to a foot on the
mountain.
Lukeman had the curving face of the mountain blasted off to a vertical
wall 305 feet wide by 190 feet high. Although the steep area looks
almost straight up, the bottom of the cut made a shelf extending outward
42 feet.
To get his men up against the wall where they could work, Lukeman had
twenty-one 10-inch steel beams placed along the top of the cut, so they
extended 30 feet out into space. Workmen’s scaffolds were suspended from
these by steel cables, with winches to raise and lower them. A dozen men
usually were on the job, although 42 crowded the scaffolds during one
rush period. Only eight were carvers, the rest helpers.
The sketch of Lukeman’s model was painted onto the mountain by
painstakingly measuring all the component points, so there could be no
distortions in the figures.
[Illustration: Four men directing a pneumatic drill.]
[Illustration: Lukeman’s original master model.]
Cutting into Stone Mountain had to be done mechanically since explosives
can start a crack in granite that may run on for many feet. If an area
four feet high by two feet wide needed to be gouged out two feet deep a
jackhammer crew would drill a row of holes almost touching each other
down the sides and across the bottom, then a row slanting downward
across the top. Wedges were hammered into the slanting holes until the
block broke loose and plummeted earthward.
A drill was good for only a few minutes in the hard granite before its
point was dulled, and a fresh one had to be inserted. The dull drills
were sent by cable and pulley down to the shop on the ground just out of
range of falling rock, where two blacksmiths were kept busy sharpening
and repairing tools.
Whereas one man can hold a pneumatic drill straight up and down to break
up the paving in a street, it took four men per hammer to drill
horizontal holes into the face of the mountain. One guided the drill and
held it in place. Two helped lift the heavy hammer. The operator did his
share of lifting and worked the trigger. All exerted what force they
could to press the drill into the mountain.
After a figure was blocked out in this manner, skilled carvers with hand
and air-powered tools completed the job.
Lukeman blocked out the figures of Lee and Davis and finished their
faces and also roughly outlined Lee’s horse, Traveler, before the
deadline of March 20, 1928. It was evident that he was capable of
completing the monument. The Confederate Commemorative half-dollars were
arriving from the mint, and the way they were being bought up by the
public indicated that financing the carving would be no problem.
Altogether, 2,314,000 of these coins were struck. A million were melted
back into bullion, and the rest eventually were put into circulation.
Incidentally, the coins had about as much material as could be stamped
into that small a piece of silver. On one side were Lee and Jackson on
horseback. Thirteen stars for the thirteen Confederate States showed
above them, and over this firmament was the slogan, “In God We Trust.”
At the bottom was “Stone Mountain, 1925.” On the back side were 48
stars, the raised image of Stone Mountain with an eagle above it and
Miss Liberty, and printed below, “United States of America Half Dollar.
Memorial to the Valor of the Soldiers of the South.”
[Illustration: Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York was guest of honor
when Lukeman’s Lee was unveiled.]
The deadline date of March 20 came and went with no word from the
Venables about extending the contract. On April 9, the 63rd anniversary
of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Atlanta’s Gate City Guards militia
unit hosted an unveiling of the Lee and Davis features. The extremely
popular Mayor Jimmy Walker of New York was guest of honor.
On May 20, 1928, the Venables reclaimed their property, ending the UDC’s
chance to complete the memorial.
In 1958 the Georgia Legislature finally got around to developing the
state’s greatest tourist attraction. It named a Stone Mountain Memorial
Association, with authority to purchase the mountain and surrounding
land, 3,200 acres in all, for a state park, and to complete a
satisfactory Confederate monument.
Nine of the nation’s leading sculptors were invited to visit Stone
Mountain and submit plans for the memorial. The Association approved a
suggestion by Walker Kirtland Hancook of Gloucester, Mass, for making
Lukeman’s uncompleted design appear intentional by carrying the carving
to a point that would be aesthetically satisfying, a device used
effectively by Michelangelo.
Mr. Hancock was engaged in 1963 and charged with responsibility for
finishing the design according to his plan, for serving as a direct
consultant for the carving, and for developing the memorial area.
The Association employed George Weiblen, whose family had operated the
quarry at Stone Mountain, to assemble a crew and get the mountain ready.
In 37 years the steel supports for the stairway had rusted out and
required replacing, as did the steel cables and scaffolding. Bids were
asked for a 400-foot elevator up to the carving, and when the costs
seemed entirely too high, a prefabricated elevator was ordered, and the
work crew put it up in 28 days. It was the world’s highest outside
elevator.
A skilled carver was hired to begin the carving. He rode up on the new
elevator and studied from arm’s length the acre of granite which he was
expected to fashion into three horsemen. He found that he simply could
not visualize such gigantic figures at such close range.
The foreman of the working crew, Roy Faulkner, a young Marine veteran
from nearby Covington, experimented with the new carving tool to be
used, and discovered he had a knack for it. Although the foreman had
never had an art lesson, and his only previous experience with stones
was throwing them, he was assigned some smoothing tasks by sculptor
Hancock while the search continued for an experienced carver. Soon the
search was forgotten. Roy Faulkner stayed on the face of the mountain
for more than six years, to complete the world’s largest carving.
The new tool was the thermo-jet torch developed for use in granite
quarries. It consisted of an eight-foot pipe fed by three hose lines.
One hose carried kerosene, another oxygen, and the third water to be
sprayed through the jet nozzle to keep it cool. The operator could
adjust the flame to any temperature up to 4,000 degrees.
When such intense heat strikes granite the moisture between molecules is
suddenly converted into steam, literally exploding the surface crystals,
or flaking them off, as quarrymen say. Flakes fell away in a continuous
stream. In coarse, deep gouging, slivers as big as dinner plates and
half an inch thick, sailed off the mountain like miniature red-hot
flying saucers.
One thermo-jet torch could remove several tons of stone in a day; more
than 48 men could do in a week with drills and wedges. Carving with it
was a one-man job. Two men trying to work in the same area would have
bombarded each other with hot rocks. Even one could expect some lumps.
Exploding flakes popped out in many directions, sometimes straight back,
or ricochetting off the mountain or steel cables. The operator wore a
plastic shield over his face, as well as muffs to protect his ears from
the roar of the torch, which was the dominant sound in the north end of
the Park for six years.
The torch acted like a miniature jet engine, developing about as much
backward thrust as an automatic shotgun. The carver had to keep his body
braced against this force as long as the flame was lit.
Fine carving was done with a tool half as large. With the flame adjusted
as thin as an acetylene torch’s, it could cut along a pencil mark.
The carving was continued from Lukeman’s master model, with several
important changes made by Hancock. He stopped the monument below the
riders’ knees, creating an illusion that the horsemen were just emerging
from the rough stone. This saved months of carving that would have
produced no more than a view of horses’ legs and hooves. The army that
Lukeman planned to have following behind was left off entirely, making
the three leaders the entire monument. The sculptor lowered the head and
neck of General Lee’s horse so that more of President Davis and his
horse could be seen, and he gave Davis a civilian hat instead of the
campaign hat Lukeman modeled. And, Hancock modeled a new head of
Stonewall Jackson to make him look more like the photographs taken just
before the General’s death.
Looking at the finished work, it seems amazing that a man could get his
first lesson in carving on the world’s biggest monument, and go on to
complete it. In explaining how he carved, Faulkner said that mostly he
measured. If he was to start a new feature, like the knuckle of General
Lee’s first finger, he measured the distance to it from his center line
on the master model. Then he checked to get the distance to the knuckle
from Lee’s ear, his nose, Davis’ eye, the ear tips of the horses, and
other spots. Interpolating inches on the model to feet for the
mountainside, he measured from corresponding points on the carving. When
all the measurements came out at the same place, he drilled a hole there
to the exact depth corresponding to the distance from the knuckle to the
plumb line at the front of the model. To insure against cutting away too
much of the adjoining stone, he measured and drilled depth holes for all
of the features nearby.
After making certain that all the measurements were correct, he fired up
the large torch and cut down to within half an inch of the bottom of the
holes, then switched to the smaller torch to carve the rest of the way.
He said he always tried to keep in mind the first fundamental of
sculpture—never cut too deep nor in the wrong place. He thoroughly
understood that carvers cannot erase mistakes nor paint over them nor
sew them up. The only way is not to make them.
[Illustration: Stonewall Jackson’s cap.]
[Illustration: Carving Jackson’s arm.]
[Illustration: An interesting portrait of Sculptor Walker Kirtland
Hancock.]
[Illustration: Roy Faulkner’s torch sends out slabs of hot granite
like flying saucers.]
[Illustration: Ray Faulkner’s torch.]
[Illustration: Sculptor Hancock lowering head of Lee’s horse on the
master model.]
The jet flames glazed the surface of the remaining stone, leaving a
grayish glassy effect. This was removed and the whiteness of the live
granite restored by going over it lightly with a surfacing machine, a
vibrating tool driving a four-point tip.
Roy Faulkner figures that in six years he drilled thousands of holes in
the acre of granite—more than ants ever dug in an acre of meadow.
Experience did not speed up the work much. He was just as careful
measuring the last points to be carved as the first.
There were special models of the heads of men and horses, on a scale of
four-to-one. When working on a head Faulkner took the corresponding
model up on the scaffold for ready and frequent references.
Incidentally, errors in the harness showed that Mr. Lukeman’s experience
with horses had been purely academic. He had all the harness buckles
backward, so that a hard pull on the reins would have made the bridles
come apart. The buckles are turned around right on the mountain.
The sheer side of Stone Mountain would seem a lonely place to spend six
years, but the man who was up there never found it lonesome. He had a
couple of aides to stretch the opposite end of the tape measure, help
raise and lower scaffolding and do other jobs, but conversations could
not be heard over the roar of the torch.
“The entire job was one of the most satisfying experiences anyone could
have,” Faulkner declared. “In the first place, it was a privilege to be
associated with such a great man as Mr. Hancock.
“Everything about the work was a challenge. The danger was very real. I
was aware every minute I was up there that a misstep, or a little
carelessness, could drop me to my death. The wind helped keep me on my
toes. When you hardly noticed a breeze on the ground, it could be
gusting at 50 miles an hour, first into your back, then bouncing off the
mountain into your face.
“The work was hard enough to keep a man in trim. After leaning against
the thrust of that jet for an hour or two or three, when I turned off
the flame, I felt like taking a rest. There was enough climbing up and
down ladders to keep legs and lungs in good order.
“For six years I worried that I might make a mistake. After coming down
in the evenings I checked over the day’s figures in the studio to make
sure they were right. Then I drove home with them in my head, ate with
them, and often slept with them. The worst dream I ever had was the time
I saw General Lee’s head lying in the ditch at the base of the mountain.
“Among my greatest experiences was, on several occasions, to look into
the stone and visualize the full outline of the feature I was about to
carve. Then I often got the opposite reaction just before I finished
with a component such as a horse’s eye or nostril. From the close-up
view it seemed to be the wrong shape or in the wrong place, and up there
on the mountain you don’t step back for a better look. It was a relief,
on coming down, to see that it fit.
“I realized at all times that I was carving the largest piece of
sculpture that man ever attempted, one that would last through eternity.
“You could hardly do anything more satisfying than that.”
HISTORY
[Illustration: Magazine artist’s view of Stone Mountain in
ante-bellum times.]
The earliest history of the mountain was literally dug up by Lewis
Larson, Jr., assistant professor of anthropology at Georgia State
College in Atlanta. He explored the present bottom of the lake around
the western side while the dam was being built. Along with more recent
artifacts, Mr. Larson and his helpers collected shards of soapstone
bowls and dishes, carved and used by Stone Age people possibly five
thousand years ago, long before early Americans learned to shape and
bake pottery.
Local historians have tried hard to find evidence that Hernando de Soto
visited Stone Mountain. Actually, if that old conquistador had set out
to touch all the points his name has been associated with, his iron-clad
ghost would still be riding hard and only half way through its
itinerary. De Soto certainly did not see this rock, or his chroniclers
would have described it in detail as a large-scale replica of the
Gibraltar they left behind.
The first white man to see Stone Mountain seems to have been Captain
Juan Pardo, sent by the Spaniards in 1567 to encircle Georgia with
forts. He followed somewhat the route taken by de Soto’s ill-fated
expedition. Pardo fared some better. He got back to St. Augustine with
his life, but he did little fortifying.
Pardo regarded as his most important achievement the discovery of what
he called Crystal Mountain, a great mountain that glistened in the sun
and was surrounded with diamonds and rubies and other precious stones
lying on the ground for the picking up. Unfortunately, Indians kept him
and his men too busy for gem collecting at that time.
The captain spent the rest of his life at St. Augustine trying to raise
a force of 500 men for another trip to Crystal Mountain, promising to
make every one of them rich, as well as any who would help finance the
expedition. Since he had failed in his fort-building mission and had not
been able to pick up a pocketful of gems, even when he was walking—or
running—over them, he was unable to find 500 men willing to risk life
and fortune on the venture. Pardo’s diamonds and rubies are still to be
found on top of the ground at the base of the mountain. They are
crystals of quartz, fully as beautiful as gem stones, but not so rare,
and therefore not so valuable. Many of today’s visitors, less hurried
than the captain and his men, pick up a few for souvenirs.
The first eye-witness description of Stone Mountain in English appears
to have been an account written by a British officer and published in
London in 1788. The Britisher almost certainly came into the area to
incite Indians to fight against the colonists in the Revolutionary War.
Unlettered traders probably viewed it earlier than that, but seeing no
profit, dismissed it as being of no consequence to themselves.
The mountain enacted its first role in modern history on June 9, 1790.
President George Washington had sent Colonel Marinus Willet to confer
with chiefs of the Creek Nation and arrange for an emissary to visit him
at the capitol in New York. In that era of few addresses in the
wilderness the meeting was scheduled for Stone Mountain as a spot
familiar to all the Indians.
The colonel reported in his _Narration of the Military Acts of Col.
Marinas Willet_:
“Here we found the Cowetas and Curates to the number of eleven waiting
for us. While I was at Stony Mountain, I ascended the summit. It is one
solid rock of a circular form about one mile across. Many strange tales
are told by the Indians of the mountain. I have now passed all Indian
settlements and shall only observe that the inhabitants of these
countries appear very happy.”
[Illustration: Elias Nour and Willard Neal near the top of Stone
Mountain]
The colonel could have made us all happier by setting down some of the
stories he was told. By his failure to do so, those strange tales are
lost forever. Incidentally, even in 1790 the southern Indians were no
longer savage aborigines. They had been trading with the Spanish,
British and French for more than two hundred years, had adopted many of
the white men’s ways and utterly forgotten much of their tribal lore.
Their extensive farms had grown up in trees and their elaborate system
of trade had been abandoned, while they depended largely for their
living on hunting for furs or hiring out in the white men’s wars.
Head of the Indian delegation at Stone Mountain was Alexander
McGillivray, son of a Scotch trader and a half-breed Indian princess.
After completing his education in Baltimore, McGillivray worked in a
counting house in Savannah until the start of the Revolution, then
returned to his mother’s tribe in Alabama where he quickly rose to chief
of the United Creeks, and the Seminoles and Chicamaugas as well. He also
became a colonel in the British Army, in return for inciting his
tribesmen to harass settlers in Georgia and Tennessee.
After the war ended and the British left, McGillivray accepted a similar
role with the Spanish in Florida. President Washington sent for him,
hoping to placate him and stop the depredations along the frontier.
[Illustration: The assassination of Chief William McIntosh.]
Twelve more chiefs arrived for the meeting at Stone Mountain, making
twenty-three, with a lot of braves, most of whom were relatives of the
chiefs, and Willet started with them on the long and colorful procession
to New York.
McGillivray accepted payment for his property in Savannah that had been
confiscated. The Georgia colony already had twice bought and paid for
the land east of the Oconee River, but McGillivray sold the same land
again, and signed a third treaty for $100,000. For assurance against
further Indian troubles, Washington commissioned him brigadier general
in the United States Army and awarded him a pension of $1,200 a year.
McGillivray went immediately to Pensacola, where the Spaniards
proclaimed him emperor of the Creeks and Seminoles and paid him $3,500 a
year to continue harassing Georgia settlers. He died in 1793 of “gout of
the stomach,” which may have been an unidentified poison.
In 1802 the Creeks signed a treaty giving up their lands west of the
Oconee River to the state line. Georgia then ceded the Alabama and
Mississippi territories to the United States government in exchange for
a promise to remove all the Indians from within the state’s borders, a
pledge that was not carried out. The state began distributing the land
by lottery in 1803.
Reports of the rock that was as big as a mountain continued to arouse
wide interest, but they were descriptions given by Indians. Few white
men still had seen it. M. F. Stephenson, the famous gold assayer of
Dahlonega, wrote that in 1808 an Englishman returned to London with the
story, but the location of the mountain was so far from the Blue Ridge
peaks that he thought it was man-made. The president of the Academy of
Arts and Sciences in Paris addressed a letter to the Hon. R. W.
Habersham of Savannah asking for the dimensions and other data
concerning this vast relic of _architectural_ grandeur.
The frontier continued in turmoil, which reached a climax through
incitement of the Indians by the British in the War of 1812. In 1814
Andrew Jackson, with 2,500 militiamen and a lot of Cherokees, cornered
and practically annihilated the militant branch of the Creeks at
Horseshoe Bend of the Coosa River in Alabama.
During the years several more treaties concerning the Stone Mountain
area were signed and ignored. The Creeks enacted the death penalty for
any chief who disposed of any more of the tribe’s properties. Then Chief
William McIntosh again sold the land between the Oconee and
Chattahoochee rivers for $400,000 in a treaty signed at Indian Springs
in February, 1825. Two months later he was riddled with bullets from a
hundred Creek rifles.
The next year, in 1826, President John Quincy Adams invited thirteen
Creek chiefs to Washington and bought the land east of the Chattahoochee
again.
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.”
[Illustration: 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.]
[Illustration: The scaffolds swinging against the carving, hundreds
of feet above the ground, were the working area for the carver and
his aides for six years.]
[Illustration: Scaffolds.]
[Illustration: Scaffolds.]
Colorful flowers on Stone Mountain.
[Illustration: A field of _Viguiera porteri_, or Confederate
daisies.]
[Illustration: White milkweed, _Asclepeas variegata_.]
[Illustration: Rare _Hypericum splendens_.]
[Illustration: Evening primrose, _Oenothera fruticosa_.]
[Illustration: _Rosa Carolinia_.]
[Illustration: Practically every square foot of exposed granite is
covered with lichens or mosses.]
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
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.
[Illustration: 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.]
[Illustration: Broken ledges and scattered blocks of stone show
where granite was quarried.]
[Illustration: 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.