The Cherokee, who had four settlements in Rabun County, traveled on a network of trails that converged at The Dividings in present-day Clayton. A trail leading north from The Dividings passed through the Rabun Gap, taking Cherokee travelers to North Carolina and Virginia.
Explorers and Settlers Legend has it that the Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernando de Soto and his army marched from Florida through the Rabun Gap into North Carolina in search of gold in the 1500s. However, the first fully documented account of a European passing through the Rabun Gap came from Sir Alexander Cuming in the 1730s. He was on a mission to form an alliance between the Cherokee and the British for trading and military purposes. He traveled from Charleston to Cherokee villages around what is now Lake Keowee in South Carolina. From there he journeyed to the northwest corner of the state, crossed the Chattooga River and came to the area around Clayton. Cuming then passed through the Rabun Gap on his way to Cherokee settlements in Franklin, North Carolina and Tennessee. The Rabun Gap also funneled the earliest white settlers into Rabun County and adjacent areas in the early nineteenth century. Scots-Irish in Pennsylvania initially migrated south to Virginia and North Carolina. Many continued moving farther south into Georgia through the Rabun Gap.
Entrance to the unfinished Stumphouse Tunnel on the Blue Ridge Railroad route in South Carolina
French and Indian War The Cherokee allied themselves with the British during the French and Indian War of 1754-1763. Cherokee war parties from Georgia traveled through the Rabun Gap on their way north to the Ohio Territory to battle the French and their Native American allies. Around 1760, a combined British-American army of 1,600 soldiers from Charleston marched on a Cherokee trail along Warwoman Creek and proceeded north through the Rabun Gap to forts in North Carolina and Tennessee. Starting in 1776, the Cherokee, again allied with the British during the Revolutionary War, and used the same route through the gap to raid villages in North and South Carolina.
Turnpike Road A Tallulah Falls Railroad passenger train passing through the Rabun Gap north of Mountain City
The Georgia legislature appropriated funds in 1827 to improve a north-south
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