Foxfire

Our History Land and Change in Rabun County: A Close Look at Community in 1975

Adapted from Foxfire, vol. 9 no. 1, Spring 1975

Margaret Norton cards wool for spinning, 1972 In 1975, Foxfire released a special edition of the magazine that focused on change in their community. This was created as part of a larger project funded by a grant from the Office of Environmental Education. Three recent Foxfire graduates at the time, Mary Thomas, Barbara Taylor, and Laurie Brunson, spearheaded this project, and focused in on Betty’s Creek. Laurie Brunson wrote of the experience: “What had started out as a topic of local interest was now, we felt, an important subject relevant all over in its comment on the effects of the seemingly never ending changes we all face in the already incredible and ever increasing pace of life we endure.” Their work looks at the way in which a small, isolated, close-knit community evolved and how increases in the pace of life changed such a community. They studied how relationships with the landscape altered as younger generations started to sell off family land. The following is an excerpt from their interview with long-time Rabun County resident Margaret Norton. “My grandfather was named Doc Burrell and he come here from South Carolina or somewhere over in there. His wife was a Carter, Sally Carter, and he used to own this land that’s right here (the Rock House at the Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, Georgia). Before Carroll Latimer owned it, Grandpa Burrell owned it. That was on my daddy’s side. My daddy’s name was Rom Burrell. Rom owned some land up the road from here (he didn’t own this up here because his daddy sold it before he was big enough to own land). You know that old house that’s up on the left hand side of the road as you go down? Well, that’s ours. That’s where we was born and raised. Now the way he got a hold of that is he married, well, my mother was born there. He married Love Beavert and he inherited half of the land and him and her bought the other half. There was just two heirs in to it, which was Love and Faye. Faye was my mother’s niece. And my daddy bought her part of the land so therefore it all belonged to him. Now Rom Sr., my daddy, was brother to Decatur and he owned what is now Moon Valley. Now my Grandmother Burrell had a sister by the name of Lou Lindsay and he took care of Lou Lindsay and she gave him what she had. She had that land up there and she was a Carter before she married Mr. Lindsay and he didn’t live very long. She was Sally’s sister and they come from Towns County, Georgia. I’ve lived here on Betty’s Creek all my life. I was borned in that house on the left hand side of the road as you go down. The only place I’ve ever moved was from down there up to where Richard, my husband, is. I’ve seen all the changes as they come along up here on Betty’s Creek. Before the pavin’ of the road, this was just a small settlement and all the families and the farmers owned their land. Now lots of the land has been sold out and now they have new families moved in here, or they are in the process of movin’. They have bought land up here and are building houses. If people sell their land, the mountains might get overcrowded. They don’t sell it for the money. They sell it because the tax is so high that they are not able to pay it. So many people are wanting land; I don’t know why now. You know, Rabun County was established on land at fifty cents an acre and back in them days, people didn’t have no problem over lines. They would say, “Your land is here,

Margaret Norton during the filming of a JFG Coffee commercial,1975

and my land is here.” You didn’t hear no fussin’ and fightin’ over lines like they do now. People are selling out their land even to where their children wouldn’t have anywhere to live. But now, not so up on Betty’s Creek. People on Betty’s Creek won’t sell their land. Somebody comes nearly every day to buy land. But we got four children and seven grandchildren. They all got to have a place to live. Richard won’t sell an acre of land for $2,000. He’s been offered $2,500 for one acre. But what would he do with his $2,500 and his land gone? Well, it would soon be gone and you wouldn’t have nothin’. Sometimes people that are gettin’ old and their grandchildren have inherited [the land]; maybe the grandchildren haven’t lived here, lived somewhere off from here, and they decide to sell their land. That is the only kind of land that has been sold. They have moved off to the city or something and they say, “Well, we had rather have the money as to have the land.” They sell ten acres of land for $10,000. That’s all the land that has been sold here on Betty’s Creek. People are gettin’ so crowded now, everybody needs land, everybody needs somewhere to live. Well, we haven’t got nay but good people that come in the last few years. They come up here from Atlanta and Florida, and they say their idea is to bring money into a section, not to come to take it away. There’s people works for ‘em that wouldn’t have those jobs. They could have got a job, but they’d a’ left Betty’s Creek. They’d a’ had to went somewhere else, backwards and forwards each day. Course, when I grew up, there wasn’t no place to work. There wasn’t no factories or no place to work. We always felt like we was the backwoods people and we didn’t have the chance the city people had. So the city people tells us now that we’s the best off. You know how the city people used to look at the country people? They thought they had to get up and go to work without a cup of coffee for breakfast. That’s what they called “mountain people”; didn’t even have coffee for breakfast. So when they got up here and found out what the mountain people had—their own hams and their own meat and everything—they changed their mind. The city people bring in new ideas and new ways of doing things. Some say they disturb the togetherness of the community. But they are not here to take advantage, they are here to build up. If I was in charge of the mountains, I’d just let ‘em be natural. I think, once in a while, the timber should be cut off of ‘em, because when it gets big it just falls down and knocks the other over. But so far as to puttin’ houses on top of the mountains and big highways on top of ‘em, I don’t agree with that. Of course, it don’t look fair for some people to own everything and some people not to have anything. But you could start out and divided everything equally with everybody, and how long would it be before somebody would be out? That is what the people here say.” Read more from Margaret in the Foxfire books!

Foxfire is a not-for-profit, educational and literary organization based in Rabun County, Georgia. Founded in 1966, Foxfire’s learnercentered, community-based educational approach is advocated through both a regional demonstration site (The Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center) grounded in the Southern Appalachian culture that gave rise to Foxfire, and a national program of teacher training and support (The Foxfire Approach to Teaching and Learning) that promotes a sense of place and appreciation of local people, community, and culture as essential educational tools. For information about Foxfire, foxfire.org, or call 706-746-5828.

Our History Rabun County Historical Society

Aunt Fannie: Hostess of Sinking Mountain Buttermilk for Female Guests, Stronger Stuff for the Men

By Dick Cinquina

Sinking Mountain is located about seven miles northwest of Tallulah Falls. The mountain was so named because some claimed it was sinking a few inches every year. People swore you could feel the mountain moving under your feet. But we are getting ahead of our story about the Hostess of Sinking Mountain.

Fannie Picklesimer was born across the Georgia state line in North Carolina in 1825. In 1841 at the age of 16, she married William Rufus Kerby and moved to Rabun County. Four years and four children later, Fannie’s husband died shortly after completing the family’s log home at the foot of Sinking Mountain. She remarried in 1852 to Ambrose J. Smith, who became one of the most prosperous farmers (relatively speaking) in the Camp Creek settlement around Sinking Mountain. He also had time for siring seven more children.

A railroad that later became the Tallulah Falls Railroad was extended to Tallulah Falls from Cornelia in 1882, ushering in an age of tourism and grand hotels at the village. Traveling by train, thousands of tourists flocked to the village to view the thundering falls, called the Niagara of the South, in the 1000-foot-deep Tallulah Gorge. For several decades, Tallulah Falls was one of the most popular resorts in the Southeast.

Aunt Fannie is seated in the center foreground at her cabin, surrounded by a group of her guests

Aunt Fannie standing in front of her homeplace in the Camp Creek community

Serving Fried Chicken to Tourists

Growing numbers of these tourists made the difficult trip by horse and buggy to visit Sinking Mountain to see if it was, in fact, slowly disappearing into the ground. Fannie Picklesimer Kerby Smith, by this time known simply as Aunt Fannie, took notice of the tourists passing by her home at the foot of the mountain. Known as a good cook, the enterprising woman decided to capitalize upon this situation by serving meals to the tourists. Visitors came with the idea of enjoying a meal of Aunt Fannie’s fried chicken, home-grown vegetables and hot biscuits, but some decided to stay at her home for a few days or even weeks.

Aunt Fannie’s guestbook was filled with gastronomical praise. One visitor exclaimed, “Fried Chicken! And buttermilk ain’t even in it.” Reflecting the tourist magnet that Tallulah Falls became, her guestbook contained laudatory comments in French, Italian, German and Spanish. One scholarly guest praised Fannie’s cooking in classical Greek. During the week of August 1, 1892, Aunt Fannie’s guests came from Atlanta, Athens, Macon, Toronto, Kansas City, New Orleans and New York.

Moonshine for the Gentlemen

However, there was another, more colorful side to Aunt Fannie’s homey hospitality. Andrew Gennett, head of Gennett Brothers Lumber Company that clear-cut thousands of acres of Rabun County forestland, once boarded at Aunt Fannie’s home. He characterized her as “a notorious old woman who had dealt all her life in liquor, but was also a competent and successful housewife.” The 1891 the Clayton Tribune carried an article from the Vernon Courier (Lamar County, Alabama) that reported,

“Aunt Fannie Smith, a peculiar character who lives at the foot of Sinking Mountain near Tallulah Falls, has been raided by the revenue men, who destroyed 300 gallons of illicit liquor…Her husband was an illicit distiller and, since his death, she has continued the business. Her cabin is a favorite resort for all the visitors to the falls. She treats the women to buttermilk, while the gentlemen always get the illicit article.”

Cherokee Chief Who Went to Church

The few remaining Cherokee in the area knew a good thing when they saw it, and we are not talking about whiskey. During the summer months, Indians sold blankets, pottery and jewelry to tourists passing the Smith property. In winter, Fannie provided food to the Cherokee camping on the farm.

According to one of her daughters, Fannie persuaded Chief Gray Eagle, leader of the small band of Cherokee in Rabun County, to attend her Wolf Creek Baptist Church. It did not go well. The minister, gesticulating wildly, delivered a leather-lunged fire and brimstone sermon to his congregation, condemning sinners in the audience to a one-way trip to the fiery pits of hell. Unaccustomed to such shouting and gyrations, Gray Eagle stood up, stared at the minister and said, “Whiskey too much. Whiskey too much.” He left the church and never returned. Undeterred, the minister completed his stem-winder.

Poking Around Hell for a Nickel

Fannie Picklesimer Kerby Smith

Aunt Fannie also was known to be a frugal businesswoman. A granddaughter recalled, “It’s been said she was quite stingy. One local saying about her was that she wouldn’t actually go to hell for a nickel, but she’d poke around the edges trying to get at it until she fell in.”

In addition to feeding her many guests and plying men with moonshine, politics was Aunt Fannie’s other great interest. On the day of an election, she would station family members and friends at polling places around Rabun County to prevent people from voting more than once. (Apparently, the practice of voting multiple times did not originate in Chicago). Even in her later years, Aunt Fannie would ride throughout Rabun County to campaign for her favored candidates.

Aunt Fannie continued serving fried chicken, buttermilk and corn whiskey to her guests until the day she passed away at 89 in 1914. Her home no longer exists, and Sinking Mountain cannot be found on today’s maps. Perhaps it actually sank.

Aunt Fannie’s cabin was still standing in this 1996 photo Learn more about our history by becoming a member of the

Rabun County Historical Society. Membership and complete information about the Society’s museum are available at www.rabunhistory.org. The newly renovated museum at 81 N. Church St. in downtown Clayton, which houses the Southeast’s largest collection of Tallulah Falls Railroad artifacts, is open Thursday-Saturday from 11 to 3. 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. Visit us on Facebook.

Dick Cinquina holds graduate degrees in history and journalism, making his work for the Rabun County Historical Society a natural fit for his interests. He is the retired president of Equity Market Partners, a national financial consulting firm he founded in 1981. In addition to writing monthly articles for the Georgia Mountain Laurel, Dick helped produce the Society’s new web site and is involved with the renovation of the group’s museum. After vacationing in this area for many years, he and his wife Anne moved to Rabun County in 2018 from Amelia Island, Florida.