Farming in Rabun County: Maize, Subsistence Farms and Moonshine By Dick Cinquina
T
he earliest white settlers, Scots-Irish from Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina, arrived in northeast Georgia in the late eighteenth century. They farmed the land to survive, but those settlers were not the first to raise crops in the fertile valleys and river bottomlands of what would become Rabun County. Already living in the north Georgia mountains were Native Americans, who had been farming this region for at least a thousand years. The Mississippians, a mound-building culture that spanned AD 800 to about 1600, were an agrarian society. Their villages were located close to rivers and streams. Periodic flooding replenished soil nutrients, keeping their fields and gardens productive. A small mound near Dillard in northern Rabun County probably was the site of a Mississippian village along the Little Tennessee River.
Mississippian Intensive Farming of Maize Farming with a mule and plow in Wolffork Valley
One of the ways Mississippians differed from prior Native American societies in eastern North America was their heavier reliance on maize (corn) for subsistence. Maize had been grown earlier in the east, but the Mississippians farmed maize much more intensively than people had in the past. Mississippians also developed a new variety of maize called eastern flint corn that resembled modern corn and produced larger crops. This allowed Mississippian populations to grow and expand across large swaths of the country east of the Mississippi River. As Mississippian populations dwindled due to warfare and diseases introduced by European explorers, remnant tribes banded together. This amalgamation gave rise in the 1600s to the Cherokee in northeast Georgia and adjacent areas in the Southeast.
Corn and Cherokee Spiritual Beliefs Like the Mississippians, Cherokee culture was defined in large part by the cultivation of corn. From the earliest times in Cherokee history, the raising of corn was interwoven with spiritual beliefs. “Selu,” the Cherokee word for corn, is also the name of the First Woman in Cherokee creation stories. Cornfields would have surrounded the four Cherokee villages in Rabun County. Massee Apple Packing House in Tiger, circa 1940
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.
68 GML - March 2021
