The Civilian Conservation Corps in Rabun County Foxfire – Burton: The Town and Its People

Rock clean up from dynamite shot at dam construction site

Old Burton school and church

“Burton: The Town and Its People”

Adapted from the Foxfire Magazine, Fall/Winter 1991 and Foxfire 10 Original article by Chastity Grant, Lori Lee, and Ashley Lesley Edited by Kami Ahrens

any do not know that a town once lay beneath

Mthe deep waters of Lake Burton. The Burton area was located along the east and west sides of the Tallulah River. The town was described by Mrs. Willie Elliott as a “wide place in the road with an iron bridge crossing the river.” The iron bridge was built in 1902. It was located just above where Dick’s Creek enters the Tallulah River.

Now, on any weekend during the summer, you will find the lake teeming with boaters. Most visitors who enjoy the recreation Burton offers do not realize the history beneath the lake. But when we have a dry spell and the lake goes down, boaters can look down through the quiet water of Lake Burton and still catch a glimpse of the old iron bridge. Reverend James E. Turpen, Sr. was the grandson of J.E. Harvey—the local entrepreneur who made the land purchases for Georgia Power in anticipation of the dam construction. He recalled that, “Whenever the land acquisition was going on, not all the land was bought. Some land was actually traded for it. I think it was

Dr. John C. Blalock was one of three interviews done with folks who lived in Burton and Powell Gap before it was flooded. “I guess I’m the oldest man living that’s from Burton. [I was born] June 24, 1894. We lived a mile above Burton. We had a boardinghouse up there. My father was the merchant in a store about a mile above the Burton post office. We must have had about 2,500 acres across there and up across the river. We didn’t know anything about [them buying up the land for the project]. I’ll give you the exact way it was bought, every bit of it. The power company first sent up three surveyors, all graduates of Tech, and surveyed all of this. The surveyors stayed at our [boarding] house two or three months—all the time they were doing it. The government was having it surveyed on account of the water works, and so on and so forth. That’s all they ever told anybody. We never did know any different about that. [After the survey], old man Harvey went to Clayton and [checked the] county digest and found out what everybody paid taxes on. This was about 1910 or 11. I never will forget when he come riding in. Old man Harvey just walked in and said, ‘Mr. Blalock, I want to buy you out.’ He told Dad that he was working for the government and they wanted to buy the property for some utility. Mr. Harvey said, ‘You can live here the rest of this year.’ Said, ‘We want your property next year.’ And Dad told him, ‘I’ll take $9,000 for it.’ Didn’t think he’d buy it at all. I never will forget. I was just standing there listening at it. And Harvey says, ‘That includes both sides of the river and your store.’ Dad thought he got rich when he got $9,000. He had $4,000 in it. He just thought he’d make a price that would bluff him, but if he’d known what he was doing, he could have got $25,000 easy.” According to Dr. Blalock, it didn’t take Mr. Harvey long to travel to every house in Burton. “In one day, he had gone to every house and made them an offer. Everybody was pretty well satisfied [for] this reason. Nearly every one of ‘em got a pretty good profit on what they thought the land was worth. But there wasn’t much [choice]. We didn’t move until the next year. Nearly all of us back there left in the same year. We moved to Tiger, Georgia, and built a big old white two-story house.”

Mrs. Willie Elliott, Dr. Blalock’s younger sister, shared her experiences as well: “All I remember was that they didn’t tear down the house; it was left standing. We took all the belongings of course. I remember my father making the remark that they moved out the last load of furniture just before it got high enough to flood what he had in the wagon. [No one refused to move]. There wasn’t no such thing. It was covered in water and there wasn’t no way to help it. There was no way to make a living, even if they’d left the houses on the side of the ridge somewhere, if all their land was covered.

There was no way out of it. I reckon my daddy was fairly well satisfied, but hundreds of them never were. It just ruined their lives.”

Virgil Craig, who lived in Powell Gap, worked on the dam construction in the early 1910s. “Dad had a little farm down there. I don’t remember how much land my family had then; the lake covered it up. That’s what they done, you know. Water came to about eight feet over where we lived on a high place. [My dad] took the money [that the power company gave him for his land] and went to Chechero and bought another homestead. All the rest of the people in the community done the same—one here and one yonder, to and fro. They just took up their beds and walked. In the Burton settlement, there was big farmland, [but the power company] scared them out. They just about cleaned this place out; they wasn’t nobody left much. That was it. I started [working on the dam] in 1916. I worked in the rock quarry a long time. First they started drilling. That took a long time. They drilled both sides of the river to see what kind of foundation they had. It was rock bottom. They went in and drilled and drilled, filled the rock full of powder and blew it up, and we had to get in there and clean it up and get that rock out. It was dangerous.”

The dam was completed in 1919 and the reservoir in 1920. Ever since the flooding of Burton, legends have sprung up around the lost town of Burton and what lies beneath the dark waters—many of which are harmless: “Divers have been down salvaging things and stuff and they come up and swear they’ll never go down again, and say they saw catfish as big as people. The divers at Anchorage and La Prade’s [boat docks], when they come in, they’ll be there just swearing that they’ll never go back down again. The catfish are so big they’re scared of ‘em and they’re bigger than they are. Big as a grown man.!” Let us know your stories of Burton, and be sure to take pictures if you ever catch one of these monster catfish!

Early stages of Burton Dam construction, 1918

Singing convention at church in Powell Gap