When Bent Tree was being designed in the late 60s, Atlanta-based developer Spratlin and Associates hired two different firms to map out the planned locations of facilities and roads. Zachery W. Henderson & Associates and landscape architects Hudson - Welch and Associates mapped out the layout. While some of the primary areas like the front gate and the Clubhouse location (later named Club Tamarack) remained true to their original planned locations, other areas like the over-promised Marina...

Roads passing through Clayton—Highways 441/23 and 76 and Warwoman Road—are daily reminders of a distant past when the Appalachians in northeastern Georgia were known as the Cherokee Mountains. And in the land that became Rabun County, the major Cherokee trails, which are now our highways and byways, converged at The Dividings in present-day Clayton. Early explorers and settlers classified the Cherokee into three groupings, depending on their location and dialect: Lower, Middle, and...

This information is based on interviews conducted with Colonel Lemuel J. Allred and Mr. James Simmons, by the Ellijay Courier newspaper in 1887. Not long after Pickens County was carved out of Cherokee County and Gilmer in 1853 by legislation drafted by Colonel Lemuel Allred, a new town was proposed as the county seat. James Simmons, the former legislator who moved to the area in 1835 and lived in Colonel Haney Nelson's old Tavern along the Federal Road , originally proposed the name Mt....