See Seven States at Lover's Leap RoadyGoat

1932

From a sandstone outcrop on the Georgia side of Lookout Mountain, a painted compass rose points out seven states: Tennessee a quarter mile north, Alabama twenty-five miles to the west, then arrows reaching into Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia. The claim has been disputed for nearly a century. In 2015 a meteorologist ran the sight lines and argued that on the very clearest day you might see five. Rock City has never budged. Garnet and Frieda Carter opened the garden in 1932 at the bottom of the Depression and needed people to drive up the mountain, so in 1935 Frieda hired a young sign painter named Clark Byers to letter See Rock City on the roof of any barn whose farmer would let him. He covered more than nine hundred barns across nineteen states in a black Ford, paid forty dollars a month and free roof paint, and kept at it until a power line knocked him off a ladder in 1969. The cliff itself is Lover's Leap, the spot in Cherokee legend where a princess named Nacoochee threw herself after her Choctaw lover Sautee was killed by her own tribe. Stand at the marker on a clear morning before the haze sets in and whatever number of states you count, you can see that they all just blur into the same green.

RoadyGoat → · 18.8 mi away

Georgia's Two-Hundred-Year Border War RoadyGoat

1818

Georgia and Tennessee have been fighting over one mile of dirt for more than two hundred years, and the reason is water. When Tennessee was admitted in 1796, Congress set its southern border at the 35th parallel. In 1818, survey teams from both states set out to mark the line. Their instruments were bad. One Georgia surveyor reportedly asked the governor for better equipment and was denied. Both teams placed the line approximately one mile south of the true 35th parallel. This became the Nickajack line. That one-mile error matters enormously because the actual 35th parallel crosses the Tennessee River. If the border were corrected northward, Georgia would gain a sliver of access to the Tennessee River at Nickajack Lake, a potential water supply lifeline for metro Atlanta, a city perpetually running out of water. Georgia has tried to move the border at least twelve times: in the 1890s, 1905, 1915, 1922, 1941, 1947, 1971, and again in 2008 during a severe drought. The Georgia legislature has passed multiple resolutions directing the governor to pursue the claim in the Supreme Court. Tennessee has never budged. One mile. Two centuries. Billions of gallons of water. The survey error that a better compass would have prevented is now the most contested state border in America.

19.8 mi away

Chickamauga Battlefield

1863

Site of the bloodiest two-day battle of the Civil War, fought September 19-20, 1863, with over 34,000 total casualties.

15.7 mi away

New Echota Cherokee Capital

1825

The last capital of the Cherokee Nation before removal, where the controversial Treaty of New Echota was signed in 1835 leading to the Trail of Tears.

19.7 mi away

Lafayette, Georgia

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See Seven States at Lover's Leap RoadyGoat

Georgia's Two-Hundred-Year Border War RoadyGoat

Chickamauga Battlefield

New Echota Cherokee Capital

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