Putting Georgia on the map: Tallulah Point

"Since 1912, Tallulah Point has been offering the traveling public the only free roadside view of Tallulah Gorge from our covered overlook porch. We also offer an unique gift shop filled with "a little bit of everything and a lot you will remember". An authentic experience!" - Tallulah Point Overlook website

When I noticed that fellow blogger Mod Betty's blog Retro Roadmap had no posts for the neighboring state of Georgia, I felt compelled to write about one of my favorite spots, Tallulah Point, in Northeast George. We used to stop there when I was a kid on the way to see our relatives in Clayton and the place has changed very little since then. Basically a gift shop with an observation deck, the Point overlooking Tallulah Gorge has been pulling folks off the highway since 1912.


It is near this spot that Karl Wallenda crossed the Gorge in 1970 and there is a small display celebrating that momentous event in the Gorge's history. As a kid I remember seeing the cable stretched across the chasm and being amazed that someone would be brave enough to walk across. And I remember there used to be a train locomotive from Disney's The Great Locomotive Chase that was filmed nearby. This place captured my imagination and was a symbol that our long drive from Gainesville, Florida was near its end.


Looking at the business today with adult eyes I see the history in the rusty distressed signs still left around the place. The gift shop is pretty well equipped, although the only thing I was tempted to buy on two trips there this year was box of assorted moonpies. The porch still has a great view of the gorge, and a hillbilly to boot, but it seems much smaller than when I was kid. While the gorge itself is certainly no Grand Canyon it is always a great contrast from the flat Florida topography and a great way to start any trip to the mountains.


The gorge was formed as the Tallulah River eroded rock over millions of years leaving a 1,000 foot gouge in the earth. The first tourist hotel opened in 1840 and a railroad built between the Gorge and Atlanta in 1882 secured the gorge as North Georgia's first tourist attraction. The town of Tallulah Falls sprang up in 1885 and at one point there were seventeen hotels and boarding houses for visitors to the "Niagara of the South." Many of those burned down in 1921. The depression put a further hurtin' on tourism, yet somehow the little business at the edge of the gorge has endured.

Images from The Vanishing Georgia Photographic Collection

When I visit, I can feel the history in the place and my mind races back to childhood. My imagination roams from the days when locomotives brought in fancy tourists from Atlanta, to the feat of daring when Wallenda walked the equivalent of 3 city blocks on a thin wire in 1970. I can think of nothing better to represent the state of Georgia on the Retro Roadmap.

Debunking the Hillbilly myth

There is no such thing as a hillbilly. Not in real life anyways. Like any stereotype, there are people who share the characteristics associated with the fictional character. But the gun toting, barefoot, moonshine drinking, corn cob pipe smoking, overall wearing, lazy, backwoods character that is such a big part of the popular character in our pop culture is no more real today than a leprechaun or the Easter bunny. Somehow creating stereotypes of others makes us feel better about ourselves, but it really reflects back to how we feel about ourselves more than it does those we poke fun at.

The final stop overnight on the Great Hillbilly Road Trip was Clayton, Georgia smack dab between South Carolina to the west and North Carolina to the north. As we pulled off of U.S. 441 to go to my aunt's house on Warwoman road, there was one last surprise, a hillbilly restaurant called Shiners. Being Sunday it was closed so I never got to see more than the facade. The stereotype lives on.


I remember my late uncle, the youngest of my dad's six bothers and sisters telling me that he knew where a steel was. My response was "what?", and finally through an extended Abbott and Costello-like exchange I got the notion that he meant a "still" in his thick Georgia accent. And for a while I had a large Mason jar full of "peach brandy" I procured from a Georgia relative. The "brandy", (moonshine), was too strong for me to drink and I got rid of it by leaving it out at a party and letting my guests polish it off and pay the consequences for ingesting homemade rocket fuel. My dad still has a jar in his liquor cabinet. So like the clerk in the Mountaineer said, the moonshine tradition still lives on in the mountains of the South.

Warwoman Road is a twisty stretch of highway that takes you through a National Forest towards South Carolina. My relatives have resided off that road as long as I can remember, so I have lots of memories up and down its curvy asphalt path. My aunt and uncle live on top of a hill overlooking the road, and if you continue on the dirt road past their house you'll end up at the river they filmed the movie Deliverance on. I have fond memories of going out to their garden and picking vegetables that I later ate for dinner - now that is fresh. One of my favorite objects in their house is a painting of a rock house on a flying pan. My uncle's father worked for the Forestry Service and everyday he'd bring a river rock home with him when he returned from work. He eventually had enough to cover the entire house with rocks and that's the house that is now painted on the pan, his collapsible CCC frying pan. The artworks hangs in the dining room overlooking the valley where the house still sits as far as I know.

It was cool reuniting my dad with his two older sisters who are both facing health challenges. One of my aunts showed us pictures of her ten great-grandchildren, and gave us updates on relatives I've never heard of. The real treasure for me was hearing stories from when they grew up. The same aunt with the great grand kids eloped with my uncle at age 15, crossing the bridge into the adjacent state on foot because the person driving them refused to take them into South Carolina (should he be accused of transporting them across state lines.) Fifty-eight years later they are still happily married. My other aunt, the oldest in the family and the one responsible for getting them all in the Tallulah Gorge School, was the first person in our family to attend college, receiving a scholarship for her vocal talent to a nearby small college in South Carolina. My dad told me how the same aunt perhaps saved his life by fishing him out of a neighbor's spring when he was just a toddler. Both aunts returned to mountains after stints in Michigan.

Life in mountains is by no means easy as my aunt labored in a mill sewing clothes and my uncle loaded trucks for years. Today my uncle suffers chronic back pain from lifetime of exertions yet still manages to put up a load of homemade jelly while enduring excruciating pain just to stand.


The next day we went down to the community of Persimmon where my father grew up. Our objective was to visit the grave sites of those in his family who had departed. There were a small number of families who settled the region as evidenced by the many grave markers carved with the same last names. It's a peaceful spot with views of a valley and soft round hills in the distance. There is something very real about visiting a cemetery with your family buried in it. All the differences you may have while you are living melt away and it makes it easy to see beyond superficiality we normally live in. How we talk, what we were, how we acted all disappear when facing the absolute. There are no hillbillies.


We made two stops on the way home – first to see the hillbilly mannequin at Tallulah Gorge at a spot close to where it was crossed by Karl Wallenda in 1970. The second stop was to see the world's largest peanut in Ashburn, Georgia. I've passed it a zillion times and never stopped and my road trip companions were gracious enough to indulge me. And one more stop - Arby's for lunch and a great milkshake.


The road trip was supposed to be about exploring roadside hillbilly iconography and seeking connections to the "real life" hillbillies in my own family. I came away with a better understanding of what it was like for my dad's family to grow up in the Appalachians and a stronger connection to my own family, both those I traveled with and those in Georgia. I think I understood that some of the qualities associated with hillbilly character, namely resourcefulness and a connection to the natural environment may have been passed to my father and then to me. But most of all I re-affirmed that a road trip, putting some distance between yourself and your everyday life, is one of the best ways to get a better understanding about parts of yourself that go with you wherever you travel.

Birmingham or Bust

The great Hillbilly Road Trip was not a luxurious drive – there were huge chunks of miles to be covered everyday. The biggest chunk was Gainesville, Florida to Birmingham, Alabama. A lot of road and not a lot of stops; fortunately my brother drove all the way through Georgia so I could at least snap pictures from the car.

It rained all the way until we got well into Georgia and my brother and I used the opportunity to try to learn from my father what it was like to grow up in the Appalachians. He remembered the days before his family's home had electricity and to get power his father had to clear the land for the lines to be brought in. We discovered that my father's family subsisted mostly on the crops they grew and the animals they raised on small piece of land in a community known as Persimmon in Georgia. And every member of his mother's family played musical instruments except his mother, and so musical ability has eluded my family entirely. His maternal grandfather, "Grandpa Justus", often entertained the entire clan with his banjo picking (see the photo in the previous post).

Eventually my dad's father succumbed to pressure from my grandmother and moved to Michigan to work in the auto industry on the factory loading docks. He left his family behind in Georgia and drove 20 hours straight on holiday weekends to be with them. Meanwhile my father's oldest sister had managed to get my dad and his siblings accepted in the Tallulah Gorge School, a boarding school run by the Women's Club for poor Appalachian children. Eventually the entire family moved up to Michigan, but my dad was the last to leave because he had to harvest the corn crop he was growing as a school project.

Pontiac, Michigan was a new world for my father and he would ride his bike through the neighborhood in amazement at the great number of houses in such close proximity to each other. The girls at the school like to ask him lots of questions in order to hear him answer in his Southern accent, but my dad said he liked the attention!

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You know you're in the South when large bits of the roadside are engulfed in Kudzu

Our first real stop in Albany, Georgia was for an amazing lunch at Pearly's Famous Country Cooking. The owner of the restaurant met us in the parking lot and told us all about Albany's oldest family-owned restaurant before we even set foot in the door. The menu of Southern favorites was overwhelming but I settled on turkey pot roast, greens, cornbread and cheese grits. After lunch, the owner returned with complimentary dessert: buttermilk pie, the house specialty. Truly a monumental meal and our first act of Southern hospitality. And because we had traveled off the beaten path to dine at Pearly's, we stumbled across a wonderful mid-century motel sign, just as the sun peaked out from behind the clouds.

As we neared Alabama, I saw a sign for folk art and we stopped in Brooklyn, Georgia. It appeared that the folk art was really just advertisement for a small roadside church. The artist, Floria Yancey, is a self-taught artist and preacher originally from Alabama. The work reminded me of Florida's Mary Proctor or Ruby Williams with a little Howard Finster evangelism thrown in.

Finally, we drove into Birmingham and out first stop was the monumental Vulcan statue which my brother and I proclaimed as "Vulcan awesome." Downtown Birmingham was somewhat obscured by the summer haze but the view from New Deal era hilltop park was a great way to orient us to the city.

A miniature version of the 56 foot tall original stands outside Vulcan Park's museum

We stayed in the historic Tutwiler Hotel in the middle of downtown and we quickly set out on foot to explore the city. We found great architecture and wonderful vintage signs and I saw just enough to make me want to go back. Our accomodations were super-deluxe and after a great meal at one of Birmingham's urban eateries I couldn't have felt more distant from that little North Georgia farm that my father grew up on...