Read Ebook: Georgia's Stone Mountain by Neal Willard

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Ebook has 195 lines and 15542 words, and 4 pages

Looking at the finished work, it seems amazing that a man could get his first lesson in carving on the world's biggest monument, and go on to complete it. In explaining how he carved, Faulkner said that mostly he measured. If he was to start a new feature, like the knuckle of General Lee's first finger, he measured the distance to it from his center line on the master model. Then he checked to get the distance to the knuckle from Lee's ear, his nose, Davis' eye, the ear tips of the horses, and other spots. Interpolating inches on the model to feet for the mountainside, he measured from corresponding points on the carving. When all the measurements came out at the same place, he drilled a hole there to the exact depth corresponding to the distance from the knuckle to the plumb line at the front of the model. To insure against cutting away too much of the adjoining stone, he measured and drilled depth holes for all of the features nearby.

After making certain that all the measurements were correct, he fired up the large torch and cut down to within half an inch of the bottom of the holes, then switched to the smaller torch to carve the rest of the way.

He said he always tried to keep in mind the first fundamental of sculpture--never cut too deep nor in the wrong place. He thoroughly understood that carvers cannot erase mistakes nor paint over them nor sew them up. The only way is not to make them.

The jet flames glazed the surface of the remaining stone, leaving a grayish glassy effect. This was removed and the whiteness of the live granite restored by going over it lightly with a surfacing machine, a vibrating tool driving a four-point tip.

Roy Faulkner figures that in six years he drilled thousands of holes in the acre of granite--more than ants ever dug in an acre of meadow. Experience did not speed up the work much. He was just as careful measuring the last points to be carved as the first.

There were special models of the heads of men and horses, on a scale of four-to-one. When working on a head Faulkner took the corresponding model up on the scaffold for ready and frequent references. Incidentally, errors in the harness showed that Mr. Lukeman's experience with horses had been purely academic. He had all the harness buckles backward, so that a hard pull on the reins would have made the bridles come apart. The buckles are turned around right on the mountain.

The sheer side of Stone Mountain would seem a lonely place to spend six years, but the man who was up there never found it lonesome. He had a couple of aides to stretch the opposite end of the tape measure, help raise and lower scaffolding and do other jobs, but conversations could not be heard over the roar of the torch.

"The entire job was one of the most satisfying experiences anyone could have," Faulkner declared. "In the first place, it was a privilege to be associated with such a great man as Mr. Hancock.

"Everything about the work was a challenge. The danger was very real. I was aware every minute I was up there that a misstep, or a little carelessness, could drop me to my death. The wind helped keep me on my toes. When you hardly noticed a breeze on the ground, it could be gusting at 50 miles an hour, first into your back, then bouncing off the mountain into your face.

"The work was hard enough to keep a man in trim. After leaning against the thrust of that jet for an hour or two or three, when I turned off the flame, I felt like taking a rest. There was enough climbing up and down ladders to keep legs and lungs in good order.

"For six years I worried that I might make a mistake. After coming down in the evenings I checked over the day's figures in the studio to make sure they were right. Then I drove home with them in my head, ate with them, and often slept with them. The worst dream I ever had was the time I saw General Lee's head lying in the ditch at the base of the mountain.

"Among my greatest experiences was, on several occasions, to look into the stone and visualize the full outline of the feature I was about to carve. Then I often got the opposite reaction just before I finished with a component such as a horse's eye or nostril. From the close-up view it seemed to be the wrong shape or in the wrong place, and up there on the mountain you don't step back for a better look. It was a relief, on coming down, to see that it fit.

"I realized at all times that I was carving the largest piece of sculpture that man ever attempted, one that would last through eternity.

"You could hardly do anything more satisfying than that."

HISTORY

The earliest history of the mountain was literally dug up by Lewis Larson, Jr., assistant professor of anthropology at Georgia State College in Atlanta. He explored the present bottom of the lake around the western side while the dam was being built. Along with more recent artifacts, Mr. Larson and his helpers collected shards of soapstone bowls and dishes, carved and used by Stone Age people possibly five thousand years ago, long before early Americans learned to shape and bake pottery.

Local historians have tried hard to find evidence that Hernando de Soto visited Stone Mountain. Actually, if that old conquistador had set out to touch all the points his name has been associated with, his iron-clad ghost would still be riding hard and only half way through its itinerary. De Soto certainly did not see this rock, or his chroniclers would have described it in detail as a large-scale replica of the Gibraltar they left behind.

The first white man to see Stone Mountain seems to have been Captain Juan Pardo, sent by the Spaniards in 1567 to encircle Georgia with forts. He followed somewhat the route taken by de Soto's ill-fated expedition. Pardo fared some better. He got back to St. Augustine with his life, but he did little fortifying.

Pardo regarded as his most important achievement the discovery of what he called Crystal Mountain, a great mountain that glistened in the sun and was surrounded with diamonds and rubies and other precious stones lying on the ground for the picking up. Unfortunately, Indians kept him and his men too busy for gem collecting at that time.

The captain spent the rest of his life at St. Augustine trying to raise a force of 500 men for another trip to Crystal Mountain, promising to make every one of them rich, as well as any who would help finance the expedition. Since he had failed in his fort-building mission and had not been able to pick up a pocketful of gems, even when he was walking--or running--over them, he was unable to find 500 men willing to risk life and fortune on the venture. Pardo's diamonds and rubies are still to be found on top of the ground at the base of the mountain. They are crystals of quartz, fully as beautiful as gem stones, but not so rare, and therefore not so valuable. Many of today's visitors, less hurried than the captain and his men, pick up a few for souvenirs.

The first eye-witness description of Stone Mountain in English appears to have been an account written by a British officer and published in London in 1788. The Britisher almost certainly came into the area to incite Indians to fight against the colonists in the Revolutionary War. Unlettered traders probably viewed it earlier than that, but seeing no profit, dismissed it as being of no consequence to themselves.

The mountain enacted its first role in modern history on June 9, 1790. President George Washington had sent Colonel Marinus Willet to confer with chiefs of the Creek Nation and arrange for an emissary to visit him at the capitol in New York. In that era of few addresses in the wilderness the meeting was scheduled for Stone Mountain as a spot familiar to all the Indians.

"Here we found the Cowetas and Curates to the number of eleven waiting for us. While I was at Stony Mountain, I ascended the summit. It is one solid rock of a circular form about one mile across. Many strange tales are told by the Indians of the mountain. I have now passed all Indian settlements and shall only observe that the inhabitants of these countries appear very happy."

Head of the Indian delegation at Stone Mountain was Alexander McGillivray, son of a Scotch trader and a half-breed Indian princess. After completing his education in Baltimore, McGillivray worked in a counting house in Savannah until the start of the Revolution, then returned to his mother's tribe in Alabama where he quickly rose to chief of the United Creeks, and the Seminoles and Chicamaugas as well. He also became a colonel in the British Army, in return for inciting his tribesmen to harass settlers in Georgia and Tennessee.

After the war ended and the British left, McGillivray accepted a similar role with the Spanish in Florida. President Washington sent for him, hoping to placate him and stop the depredations along the frontier.

Twelve more chiefs arrived for the meeting at Stone Mountain, making twenty-three, with a lot of braves, most of whom were relatives of the chiefs, and Willet started with them on the long and colorful procession to New York.

McGillivray accepted payment for his property in Savannah that had been confiscated. The Georgia colony already had twice bought and paid for the land east of the Oconee River, but McGillivray sold the same land again, and signed a third treaty for 0,000. For assurance against further Indian troubles, Washington commissioned him brigadier general in the United States Army and awarded him a pension of ,200 a year.

McGillivray went immediately to Pensacola, where the Spaniards proclaimed him emperor of the Creeks and Seminoles and paid him ,500 a year to continue harassing Georgia settlers. He died in 1793 of "gout of the stomach," which may have been an unidentified poison.

In 1802 the Creeks signed a treaty giving up their lands west of the Oconee River to the state line. Georgia then ceded the Alabama and Mississippi territories to the United States government in exchange for a promise to remove all the Indians from within the state's borders, a pledge that was not carried out. The state began distributing the land by lottery in 1803.

The frontier continued in turmoil, which reached a climax through incitement of the Indians by the British in the War of 1812. In 1814 Andrew Jackson, with 2,500 militiamen and a lot of Cherokees, cornered and practically annihilated the militant branch of the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend of the Coosa River in Alabama.

During the years several more treaties concerning the Stone Mountain area were signed and ignored. The Creeks enacted the death penalty for any chief who disposed of any more of the tribe's properties. Then Chief William McIntosh again sold the land between the Oconee and Chattahoochee rivers for 0,000 in a treaty signed at Indian Springs in February, 1825. Two months later he was riddled with bullets from a hundred Creek rifles.

The next year, in 1826, President John Quincy Adams invited thirteen Creek chiefs to Washington and bought the land east of the Chattahoochee again.

One of the first literate descriptions of Stone Mountain was written by the Rev. Francis R. Goulding, noted novelist and inventor, who spent his later years at Roswell, forty miles away. Goulding visited the mountain on June 25, 1822, as a 12-year-old, with his father, a cousin, a Cherokee guide named Kanooka, and a slave boy named Scipio. The elder Goulding, a prosperous merchant of Darien on the coast, had just recovered from a severe spell of fever and recuperated by taking his son to the mountains to visit with the Cherokees that summer. Young Francis wrote:

"Twenty miles away to the southeast a vast prominence of rock loomed in lonely grandeur above the horizon. It was the great natural curiosity of the neighborhood, of which we had often heard and which we had resolved to visit at our first opportunity. That time had now come. Indeed, the fame of the great rock had extended to the Old Country, and had there excited interest through the representation of a British officer who had visited and described it as early as the year 1788.

"At the time of our visit the country around had barely passed into the hands of the white man, and there were few roads and fewer houses of accommodation. Our tent was pitched beside a spring near the mountain's base, around the north and west of which flows a pleasant stream. From this point the rock rose majestically, with an almost perpendicular face of a thousand feet. We enjoyed its rough grandeur almost as much by the soft light of the moon as we did by the red light of the setting sun.

"Taking an early breakfast the next morning, we made our way first to the eastern side of the mountain. Here the view was stupendous. A bare, hemispherical mass of solid granite rose before us to the height of two or three thousand feet, striped along its sides as if torn by lightning or 'gullied' by the action of water through countless ages.

"Our ascent was effected on the southwestern side, where the slope is comparatively easy and where the otherwise baldness of the rock is relieved by an occasional tuft of dwarfed cedars or stunted oaks, which find a root hold in the crevices. These trees, elevated a quarter of a mile above the surrounding level, seem to be a favorite resort for buzzards, many of which were wheeling in graceful flight in the air around, and a greater number which perched upon dead treetops, apparently resting from their labors and watching from the convenient height for objects on which they might feed in the level country below.

"We found the summit an irregularly flat oval about a furlong in length. The view from it was superb. Not another mountain could be seen in any direction within a distance of twenty-five or thirty miles. The country all around seemed to be an immense level, or rather a basin, the rim of which rose on all sides to meet the blue of the sky. To the east and south appeared a few clearings, but in every other direction the forest was unbroken.

"Encircling the summit, at a distance of nearly a quarter of a mile from its center, was a remarkable wall, about breast high, built of loose, fragmentary stone, and evidently meant for a military fortification; but when erected, and by whom, we could not learn. Kanooka said that it was there when his people first came, and that they knew no more of it than we did. In some places the stones were almost all dislodged by persons who had rolled them down the steep declivity but there were enough remaining to show that the wall had once been continuous all around the summit, and that the only place of entrance was by a natural doorway under a large rock, so narrow and so low that only one man could enter at a time, by crawling on his hands and knees."

Colorful flowers on Stone Mountain.

All the mountain's early visitors were intrigued by the pre-historic wall. Some thought de Soto might have had it built, without considering that the aim of the conquistadores was to find treasure, grab it and run. They were not interested in defensive strongholds, and certainly not in building one that would entail carrying thousands of tons of rock up a steep mountain. All the early writers described the wall as a cleverly contrived fortress, since it blocked all trails leading to the summit. However, the most ignorant savage certainly would have realized that the top of Stone Mountain would be untenable in a siege, since there was no water and no access to food. It is the last place anyone would want to be caught when shooting started.

Most likely, the wall had some religious or ceremonial significance. Toting rocks and stacking them in a line is the kind of project ancient medicine men liked to think up to keep their tribesmen occupied, like building the great mounds throughout the South and down into Mexico and South America. Even today it is not hard to visualize weirdly painted warriors climbing the mountain in a torchlight procession and dancing all night around a roaring fire at the top. Consider, too, the old medicine men's penchant for human sacrifice. At dawn the frenzied crowd probably hurled some luckless victim over the rim, while the women and children, who had waited below all night to see the poor devil fall, screamed and cheered, feeling sure that the gods would be so happy about the whole thing that they would assure bountiful crops and good hunting.

Another stone wall stands atop Fort Mountain overlooking Chatsworth, a hundred miles to the northwest, and it, too, is built at the edge of a high precipice.

The Stone Mountain wall must have contained millions of rocks, for there were enough to let men and boys test their muscles by rolling stones off the mountain for more than a hundred years, until Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, had the last ones thrown off in 1923 to make sure vandals did not start them rolling down among his workmen.

A feature on the mountain top surely as impressive as the great wall was the Devil's Cross Roads. This was a tremendous flat boulder roughly two hundred feet across and five to ten feet thick, cleft by two smooth, straight breaks making avenues four feet wide, one running directly north and south, the other east and west. They joined at right angles at the center, and directly over this juncture was another flat rock twenty feet in diameter.

The Cross Roads became a favorite spot to have breakfast for parties who climbed the mountain to watch the sunrise. And everybody wondered that nature could make a compass as accurate and a great deal more spectacular than the ancient Egyptians could do. The entire formation disappeared in 1896 when quarrymen found that it was composed of superior building stone and broke it up and let it down the mountain by winches.

DeKalb County was founded Dec. 9, 1822.

The DeKalb County courthouse in Decatur burned in 1842, destroying most of the early deeds that were on record. There are some interesting legends concerning early ownership which, because of the destroyed documents, can neither be proved nor disproved.

Perhaps the first white settler to claim ownership of the mountain was John W. Beauchamp. His descendants still tell how their great-great-great-grandpa gave Indians forty dollars and a pony worth about fifty dollars for the big rock. They say he traded it to Andrew Johnson and Aaron Cloud for a muzzle-loading gun and twenty dollars. There are legends that a jug of whiskey figured in both deals.

In 1822, the year Francis Goulding explored the mountain, the State Legislature prepared the original land grants. The mountain lay in seven different land lots, which apparently were awarded to veterans of the Revolutionary War. One lot went to the orphans of a veteran.

It is said that a man in Athens was awarded one of the grants. He walked the sixty miles or so to the mountain to examine his property, and seeing that most of it was bare rock, he swapped it for a mule to ride home.

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