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Writer's pictureRobert Scott Davis Jr.

Pioneer Engineers: The Atherton Brothers In Pickens and Cherokee County, Georgia

Updated: Nov 5


Alice Grist Mill, Pickens County
Grist Mill Remains at Alice

Pickens County, in the Appalachian Mountains and one of

Georgia's smallest counties in size and population in 1860,

existed as an isolated wilderness without railroads or rivers,

with limited waterpower. It did have a primitive marble works

and a remarkably cosmopolitan population with persons from

Ireland, France-Holland, England, and Scotland, as well as from

Northern States.


Even within those circumstances, the Atherton brothers from

Manchester, England proved special. They began building textile

factories in their native country around 1831 and later in New

York State and Paterson, New Jersey. William C. Atherton worked

on the famous textile factory at Roswell, Georgia.


In Pickens County in the 1850s, he and his brothers Thomas and James built

at Talking Rock Ford, at the present highway 136 bridge at

Blaine, the Talking Rock Cotton Factory: a sawmill, gristmill,

cotton gins, wool carder, blacksmith shop, flour mill, and

textile factory. A huge ditch is still visible that provided

waterpower for their operations. Severely damaged in guerilla

fighting during the Civil War, a fire destroyed it in 1873 at a

loss estimated at $20,000.


The Harmony Mills at Alice, however, was their most

spectacular accomplishment. First built in 1882, this

combination grist and textile mill had 800 spindles and a

capital of $25,000. Water flowed through a system of ditches

around a mountain for more than one mile and a half to provide a

drop. A wooden race stood fifty feet in the air and five hundred

feet long. The stone foundations of the wooden race remain

visible. At the beginning of the ditch, near modern highway I-

575/515/5, a small dam channeled water into the race. Any trace

of this dam is now under a modern flood control dam. Much of the

ditch remains visible. As with their other factories, they sold

it (to P. M. Tate) and moved on to other projects. The Harmony

Mills, damaged by flood, finally burned around 1897.



Iron spikes at Alice that once held Mill Race


The famous ruins of the rope mill at Woodstock and a cotton factory at

Waleska, both in Cherokee County, were also Atherton projects.


Pickens County Mysteries: A Place Called Alice. North Georgia

Journal 6 (4) (1989): 39-43 (by author)


c. 1 Disastrous Fire, North Georgia Citizen (Dalton, Georgia), April 24, 1873, p. 3


c. 2 Harmony Cotton Mills, Cherokee Advance (Canton, GA), March 13, 1891, p.

3


c. 4 Lucius E. Tate, History of Pickens County (Macon, GA, 1932), 250-51.

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