Rabun County Historical Society

route through Rabun County that was formed by the junction of two existing wagon trails at Clayton. One originating in Walhalla, South Carolina crossed the Chattooga River, followed Warwoman Road to Clayton and then turned north, passing through the Rabun Gap on its way to North Carolina. A second road ran south from Clayton, crossed the Tallulah River at Crane’s Ford near Lakemont and headed to Clarkesville. The north end of the improved road was a point on the North Carolina state line marked by a locust stake, causing the road to be known as the Locust Stake Road.

By the early 1840s, people from neighboring counties accounted for much of the traffic on this north-south route. However, they contributed nothing to the road’s maintenance. To make all users pay for upkeep, the Georgia legislature in 1845 chartered the Rabun Turnpike Road Company, which converted the Locust Stake Road into a toll road. Private parties that owned the turnpike were responsible for collecting tolls and maintaining the road. One tollgate was located at Crane’s Ford, the other at the North Carolina state line. Tolls varied from one dollar for a wagon team of six horses, mules or oxen to two cents for each head of hogs and sheep. The toll road company was disbanded in 1887.

Tallulah Falls Railroad tracks and the highway passing through the Rabun Gap in front of Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School Blue Ridge and Tallulah Falls Railroads Railroad builders also sought to capitalize upon the Rabun Gap. Former U.S. Vice President and South Carolina firebrand John C. Calhoun was a promoter of the Blue Ridge Railroad in the 1830s. His idea was to build a major freight route connecting the port city of Charleston with Cincinnati on the Ohio River. The proposed route was to pass through Clayton and proceed north through the Rabun Gap to North Carolina. Work began on the railroad in 1854, but, as a result of the Civil War, the Blue Ridge Railroad was abandoned and never completed. Unlike the Blue Ridge, the Tallulah Falls Railroad was built and used the Rabun Gap as its route through the Appalachians in Rabun County. Established in 1887, the 58-mile short line ran from Cornelia, Georgia north through the Rabun Gap and then to the line’s northern terminus in Franklin, North Carolina.

The Rabun Gap has afforded travelers—from Native Americans and European explorers to soldiers and railroad passengers—a passageway through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Rabun County for thousands of years. In so doing, this natural mountain gap has had a significant impact on the history of northeast Georgia.

Learn more about our history by becoming a member of the Rabun County Historical Society. Membership and complete information about the museum are available at www.rabunhistory.org. You also can visit us on Facebook. Following an extensive renovation and development of important new exhibits, our museum at 81 N. Church St. in downtown Clayton reopened on June 11. The Society is a not-for-profit organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, making membership dues and donations tax deductible.

By The Way Remembering Uncle Ray

By Emory Jones

Commander. Ray laughed when he told that story and said he saluted as they passed by, even though none of them ever saw the General. Ray grew chickens for 63 years in houses he mostly built himself with those strong working man’s hands. Hens lay eggs every day, so he worked seven days a week practically his whole life. If he ever took a vacation, I never knew about it. In the 1950s, Ray found and embraced something he loved almost as much as his family. That was the Habersham Electric Membership Cooperation, where he served as a director for nearly six decades. His only regret about that was missing two board meetings. One he forgot; the other time, he was in the hospital, and “the nurses wouldn’t let me leave.” His HEMC service stemmed from his memory of electricity coming to his family’s farm in the 1940s. Ray said serving the HEMC was his way of paying the co-op back for his mama not having to lug spring water anymore. Of course, Ray always joked that they had running water long before they had electricity, saying, “We’d run to the spring to get a bucketful and then run back to the house with it.” Uncle Ray had a special love for rabbits. That’s because he credited rabbits for keeping his family from starving during The Great Depression. The rabbits he and his brother caught in rabbit boxes were, more than once, all his family had to eat. He once told me that, for the rest of his life, he always sent a silent “thank you” toward every rabbit he spotted. And Heaven help any boy who ever harmed a rabbit on his farm. It’s hard not to miss someone who remembered where he was when you were born and who cared about even the rabbits.

I’ve been fortunate enough to know and love several members of what, thanks to Tom Brokaw’s fantastic book, will forever be remembered as “The Greatest Generation.” One of those has been weighing on my mind a lot lately. When I was a boy, my uncle, Ray Meaders, would show me the place on his farm where he was working when somebody came to say that I’d been born. Ray held on to memories as if they were gold. When anyone wanted to know something about a long-gone friend, family member, or property line, someone always said, “Ask Ray. He’ll know.” When Ray Elisha Meaders was born, his mother, Ruth, named him after her brother, Raymond Kincaid, who’d just died from a heat stroke while scything hay on a farm near Murphy, North Carolina. She told her son he was named for the finest man she’d ever known, and she expected him to be no less. From then until Ray Meaders died, just four days shy of his 92nd birthday, he never let his mother down. Ray’s daddy was Wiley Meaders, a farmer and potter. Pottery, plowing, and picking cotton by hand gave Ray a legendary work ethic. In fact, the phrase, “Ray Meaders is the hardest working man I ever met,” is the one I’ve most heard said about him. The second is what a good man he was. This reliable farm boy from Mossy Creek left White County, Georgia, for the first time in 1943 when he joined the army. Like most veterans of that era, Ray never talked much about his army days. But he did tell me once that he still remembered the eyes of the German pilot he shot down as the man’s plane strafed their unit.

Once, while hauling vital gas to the Battle of the Bulge, Ray’s outfit met General Eisenhower’s convoy. The General’s party pulled over because fuel trucks out-ranked even the Allied Supreme

Emory Jones grew up in Northeast Georgia’s White County. After a stint in the Air Force, he joined Gold Kist as publications manager. He was the Southeastern editor for Farm Journal Magazine and executive vice president at Freebarin & Company, an Atlanta-based advertising agency. He has written seven books. Emory is known for his humor, love of history and all things Southern. He and his wife, Judy, live on Yonah Mountain near Cleveland, Georgia.

Foxfire

“Corn Shuckin’s, Candy Pullin’s, and Ice Cream Churnin’s: Community Gatherings in the Mountains”

Adapted from the Foxfire Magazine, Spring/Summer 1971 and The Foxfire Book of Appalachian Cookery

Original article by Laurie Brunson

Edited by Kami Ahrens

Summer is always full of picnics, parties, and community gatherings. Here in the mountains, community gatherings were extra special, as most folks lived miles apart from each other. Even seemingly dull occasions, like shucking corn or building a house, became excuses to hold parities with their neighbors. Florence and Lawton Brooks remember that “everybody was invited. Wasn’t nobody skipped. They invited the young and old. They all come together. And you never seen such corn shucks in your life. And if we got done at midnight or somethin’ like that, why we’d have a big dance from then on to towards daylight. We never counted non on sleepin’ that night. No way when we was havin’ them big corn shuckin’s ‘cause we knowed it’d take th’biggest part of the night. They’d just pile up their corn in their barnyard, y’know, instead of puttin’ it in their crib. And then they’d ask all their neighbors around to come in. And they’d always bury a drink right in the middle of that pile and pile their corn on top of it. Then we’d have t’shuck all the corn to find it. We’d shuck all night. Then sometimes they’d have it where the man that found the first red ear got to kiss the prettiest girl, and sometimes he’d shuck like the devil tryin’ to find a red ear of corn. It was funny because back then that was the worst thing a boy and girl could do, would be caught kissin’! ‘Bout all the way we had of havin’ fun was at them shuckin’s, but I thought it was mighty nice of them to have things like that. I wish they’d have ‘em now back like they used to.” Aunt Arie Carpenter said her father would always “raise a big crop of corn—maybe two hundred bushels—and put it in a crib shed. On a certain day, they’d have a corn shuckin’ and get all the neighbors from everywhere to come in here. If we had ‘em like they used to, we’d have every one of you young’uns come down here and we’d have the best time. They’d always come at dinner time—some of them before dinner. Well, they’d sit down to eat, and then they’d go on to shuckin’. Sometimes they’d shuck ‘til twelve at night before they’d ever get up, and sing and holler and hoop and all the devil! And they’d take the shuck and hide people in ‘em and do ever’thing. Why they had every kind of fun in the world. That made people love to go to ‘em.”

Candy pullings were another way that communities turned chores into entertainment. Every year, folks would come together to press sorghum cane and boil the juice down to thick syrup (you can still find sorghum syrup at most small grocery stores in the mountains!). The last little bit of syrup would be saved back and turned into a candy. Ada Kelly said “when they made syrup, the last run of the syrup they’d cook up a whole lot of, and they’d cook it down ‘til it got real thick. And just along toward the last before it got ready to take up, they’d put some soda in it. I really don’t know what that did to it, but it seemed to make it get whiter or something. And a boy and a girl would usually butter a dish and cool it off some and then get it up in their hands, you know, and work it ‘til they could get it in a ball. Then the boy would get at one end and the girl at the other, and they’d pull backwards and forwards ‘til they got it so it’d pull out in great long pieces. Then they’d divide some of it and pull it out in long