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    Calhoun
    Calhoun
    Calhoun
    Ebook196 pages1 hour

    Calhoun

    By Jane Powers Weldon, James W. Lay and Dale Lowman

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    About this ebook

    Read of Calhoun's many influences on transportation, in wartime, and in the commerce of the South.


    Calhoun, the seat of Gordon County, is situated in the rolling Ridge and Valley geologic region of northwest Georgia. The long valley formed a natural migration pattern that influenced the area's settlement and is a strong economic factor today. Transportation arteries, from rivers to railroads to highways, remain a critical part of the city's development. The Cherokee Indians began the infamous Trail of Tears march near Calhoun. Later, Gen. William T. Sherman almost destroyed the village as he led his troops to the Battle of Atlanta. The region's cotton farmers supplied the early tufted-textile industry that evolved into enormous carpet and floor-covering businesses.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateMar 2, 2015
    ISBN9781439650073
    Calhoun
    Author

    Jane Powers Weldon

    Jane Powers Weldon, James W. Lay, and Dale Lowman are Calhoun natives. Weldon was an editor for Heldref Publications, director of publications for the Atlanta Historical Society, and coordinator of and contributor to the New Georgia Guide. Lay is president of the Gordon County Historical Society (GCHS) and a retired history teacher and curriculum director for Calhoun City Schools, which have long been known for their excellence. Lowman is an IS specialist for Shaw Industries and curator for the GCHS photograph collection, the primary source for Images of America: Calhoun.

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      Book preview

      Calhoun - Jane Powers Weldon

      publication.

      INTRODUCTION

      Nestling ’mong mountains,

      Sparkling with fountains,

      Beautiful city, Calhoun! . . .

      Thy beautiful river

      Flows onward forever

      . . . he passes no city like thee . . .

      So wrote Georgia poet laureate Ernest Neal in 1920 about the city in which he taught for many years and served as a representative to the Georgia General Assembly from 1913 to 1914.

      The city Professor Neal describes lies in the hills of northwest Georgia, a land inhabited by Native Americans until near the middle of the 19th century. The topography, called Ridge and Valley, is characterized by long shale, limestone, and sandstone southwest-to-northeast ridges and river valleys. Their varied geography and vegetation make the ecoregion the most diverse in Georgia.

      Formed by the confluence of the Conasauga and the Coosawattee Rivers, the Oostanaula River flows by Calhoun to join the Etowah at Rome on its course to the Coosa in Alabama. The rivers were crossed by shallow fords and, successively, wooden covered bridges, iron-framed spans, and modern concrete structures. At one time, the Oostanaula was plied by steamboats as far north as Calhoun.

      When the Cherokees left the area in the 1830s, forcibly removed on the infamous Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, small farmers and tradesmen claimed the land through a state lottery. As Indian trails became roads crisscrossing Gordon County, small settlements grew at intersections. Their schools, churches, and stores took on names from Antioch and Audubon to West Union. In 1911, there were 62 rural schools in the county.

      An election in 1850 following a major donation of land designated Calhoun the Gordon County seat, edging out the more centrally located Big Spring. The town’s population at the time numbered 150. The name of Calhoun, originally called Dawsonville or Oothcaloga Depot, honors South Carolina statesman John C. Calhoun, who was a US senator and vice president. The Georgia General Assembly incorporated the town in 1852, established its geographical limits, and designated five commissioners to lead it. The legal description did not change from town to city until 1918.

      The Western & Atlantic Railroad, now CSX, ran through downtown Calhoun. According to Lulie Pitts, first historian of the town, it was also called the Battlefield Route because of its proximity and importance to the course of Sherman’s March to the Sea. A block to the east of the railroad is Wall Street, named for a prominent citizen who was one of the town’s first five commissioners. The street is also US Highway 41, called the Dixie Highway, a major route between the South and the Midwest. The completion in 1929 of the final section linking Atlanta and Chattanooga was the occasion for a motorcade and celebrations in towns along its path. Both the railroad and the highway were critical to the area’s burgeoning textile industry.

      Textiles were a natural outgrowth of northwest Georgia’s many small farms that grew cotton and subsistence food crops. Small cotton mills spun thread, first shipped out of state, later woven into sheeting that workers stamped and tufted (colloquially, turfed) by hand to make chenille bedspreads. As the process became mechanized, men and women went to work in the Calhoun mills, leaving their small farms with fallow, eroding fields.

      One of the early mills was called Mount Alto, for a small mountain—or large hill—on the east side of downtown Calhoun, where the owner lived and where he started the tufting business in his garage. The hill was also called Peach Orchard Hill for the crop that for a few years added to the wealth of Calhoun and Gordon County farmers. For many years, the main part of Calhoun was bounded on the east by Mount Alto, Mount Pisgah, and Boulevard Heights, an early residential retreat above the flat downtown streets. To the south, the large farm of Richard Peters prospered, producing crops and livestock under the management of his daughter Nellie Peters Black and her family in the early 20th century.

      Calhoun’s first paved streets were brick, laid on the business streets in 1889. Only three years later, an ordinance banned livestock, excluding that used for transportation, from streets and parks. Two parks graced downtown Calhoun in the late 19th and early 20th centuries—Gentlemen’s Park and Ladies’ Park. Both were favorite destinations for the county’s farm families who came into town on Saturday to trade, purchase necessities, and socialize.

      An early goal of the Calhoun Woman’s Club, organized in 1902, was to provide a restroom in the Ladies’ Park for the farm women who were inconvenienced by a long day in town. The Woman’s Club then had erected in the park a small, log cabin clubhouse that became the town’s first public library. Not until the 1960s did a larger, more modern building on the site of the original cabin become Calhoun’s library.

      Other efforts to inform and educate the town’s citizens brought about the Calhoun public school system, established in 1902. Earlier educational efforts were private academies and normal schools that developed courses of study, from Latin to household tasks, that today’s children would find daunting or amusing. In 1924, the owners of the Echota Cotton Mill, with aid from Gordon County, established a school for children who lived in the mill village that lay at the northern city limits now part of Calhoun proper. Echota Mill Village consisted of 150 houses for mill workers and their families. Academies and Gordon County University, in the 19th century, and Georgia Northwestern Technical College, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, serve as examples of the importance of education to this community.

      The arts enriched the lives of Calhoun’s citizens from the town’s early years. Children recited literary classics for graduations and Woman’s Club meetings. Orchestras formed within churches to enhance religious and civic ceremonies. A world-renowned classical tenor, Roland Hayes, was born near Calhoun to former slaves in

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