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Uncovering A 200-Year-Old Road with Modern Technology

By Linda Erbele

As most of us speed down an interstate or navigate city roads, the idea of transporting products for sale or even traveling across a state line before asphalt or rubber tires is fairly unimaginable.

In the late 18th and 19th centuries, people who produced merchandise in South Carolina or Georgia knew there was a market for it in Tennessee. But getting it to buyers represented weeks of horse-pulled wagon travel.

Similarly, products that arrived at the port in Savannah were sometimes destined for buyers in Western North Carolina. Transport was available to Augusta along the Savannah River, then by road to what is now Traveler’s Rest near Toccoa, Georgia. The rest of the trip would be along a trail that was originally a Native American footpath, some 52 miles through Georgia, crossing the mountains at Unicoi Gap, and then more than 68 miles across North Carolina and Tennessee. It went through forests with sometimes steep ascents and descents, as well as multiple creek and river crossings.

The trip also went through territory controlled by the Cherokee Nation. In 1813, after requests from both Georgia and Tennessee, a treaty between the Cherokee and the U.S. government was agreed upon, allowing the construction of a road following that footpath. The treaty stipulated that the tribe would be paid $160 a year for 20 years, after which the agreement would be re-negotiated or it would revert to Cherokee ownership.

It was designated the Unicoi Turnpike.

According to Myths of the Cherokee, in Nineteenth Annual Report of American Ethnology, 1897-1898, the name “Unicoi” meant “white” in the Cherokee language. It may have referred to the travelers using the road, or the mist or haze that sometimes settles into the mountains.

It was a toll road, thus a “pike” or pole blocked the road until the toll was paid, at which time the pike would be turned, allowing access.

Road builders were hired to build the two-lane road, and although it took longer than expected, the Unicoi Turnpike was advertised as open for business in local papers in 1819. By then, the boundary of Native American lands had been pushed westward away from the new road.

Matt Gedney, whose family has deep roots in North Georgia, published Living on the Unicoi Road in 1996. Gedney reports that the tribe later sued to recover those annual payments that had never been made.

“In the early days, the tolls were published,” he says. “The toll lasted through the 1920s.”

His book listed tolls: A man and his horse were twelve and a half cents, each led horse was six and a half cents. Horses in a drove were four cents. A wagon with team was $1 and a four-wheel “carriage of pleasure” $1.25. Individual cattle were less than horses, and sheep, goats or hogs even less.

Originally meant to be a two-lane road, builders cleared and widened the Indian trail by hand. Sometimes the road curved around places where rocks or stumps were too big to be moved by men or mules.  In other cases, smaller rocks were piled on the sides.

Travel caused ruts and gullies, and erosion could make the lanes impassable. Little if any maintenance was done, so travelers would just look for a way around the rough parts. Gedney says in the village that later became Helen, Georgia, the turnpike forded the Chattahoochee River 28 times. Leaving Helen, the road turned steep—climbing to the Unicoi Gap before descending to Hiawassee and on into North Carolina.

By the 20th century, modern roads were built along the way of the trail, sometimes taking a higher road, or a straighter path because modern bulldozers could cut through mountainsides.

Cars travel the scenic roads on or near that route in many places now, but the location of the original roadbed can be difficult to determine. The route from Murphy, North Carolina to Vonore, Tennessee—68 miles—has been designated a National Millennium Trail.

In Georgia, Traveler’s Rest is a state historic site, but other than a few historic markers, much of the trail is lost. That’s something that intrigues many who live near it.

Alan Hall, who lives in Clarkesville, Georgia, says history was never one of his favorite subjects.

“But I loved going out and traipsing around the woods,” he says. “It was fascinating to me that the remnants of this old road are still there. I dream of the people who traveled on it and all their little dramas.”

Years earlier, he had the opportunity to explore an ancient stone circle on private property near the original turnpike.

Hall read about a laser technology being used in recent years that could reveal history below the surface of the ground, and he wondered if it could help locate the Unicoi Turnpike. Called LiDAR, the technology utilizes pulses of light to detect and map slight differences in ground elevation. He found public LiDAR maps from the U.S. Geological Survey, and was amazed to see that the stone circle he had walked around was well defined.

“I thought, somebody needs to put all this together and preserve it,” Hall says.

He contacted the University of North Georgia, and spoke with Dr. Jake Bateman McDonald, assistant professor of geography and geospatial science.

“We wanted to help them and I could see it would be helpful to students to learn how to interpret the landscape and do historical research and get experience presenting,” Bateman McDonald says.

He noted that moving from the computer to the physical location would be good training for the students. He also saw the project as a way to test the validity of using LiDAR-created maps to visually identify hiking or even wagon trails.

“Every environment is different, so I would never put high confidence in computer-models without field checking the results, because, by definition, a model is imperfect,” he says.

He adds that use of the technology is still fairly recent. It uses hundreds of variables to connect areas, comparing characteristics of the environment to determine what is trail and what isn’t.

The Sautee Nacoochee Cultural Center, a community organization with a mission of preserving arts and history, generously contributed to the project, as did the White County Historical Society.

Bateman McDonald, undergraduate interns Brittany Mann and Katelynn Comer and community members set out on hikes of the area to field verify the remotely-sensed potential trail locations. Handheld GPS units were used to mark portions of the trail that were found.

On the first hike, Bateman McDonald says they really didn’t know what they were looking for. He vividly remembers how difficult the hike was at first, because of all of the small stones and boulders that were piled up beneath the undergrowth. Once the understory opened up, they realized that they had been walking on the sides of the road—where rocks had been piled up by workers 200 years ago.

“If we had been 5 feet over, we’d have been right on it,” he says.

In addition to the hikes, Mann and Comer interviewed locals who were happy to share what they knew of the Turnpike. The two also conducted research in the archives at the University of Georgia.

Alan Hall accompanied the group on many of the hikes, taking pictures and introducing them to landowners. Using the layers from LiDAR as well as property maps, they learned that the old road sometimes ran along property lines.

“It was a landmark they would have used when they did surveys,” Hall says.

Based on the historical research, the hikes, the LiDAR—and in some cases, a best guess—the group created a map of the old roadbed.

Dr. Bateman McDonald says that the next step is to connect the trail that they verified to the Tugaloo River near the Traveler’s Rest state historic site. He hopes to be able to fund two additional students this summer to continue the work that Mann and Comer started.

Alan Hall is still passionate about the project, speaking to groups interested in history in North Georgia, and encouraging others to research.

“It’s like a puzzle you can work on in your house, and then go out and be in it,” Alan says. “I just hope it will be documented and preserved.”

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