Armuchee Ridges

Northwest Georgia’s ridges stand in a crowd. Taylor Ridge, Johns Mountain, Horn Mountain, Dicks Ridge and Rocky Face rise 600 to 700 feet out of the valleys around them, to crests of 1,400 to 1,600 feet, and Georgia’s 1976 physiographic map gathers them into one district. Red Mountain sandstone of Silurian age keeps them high. The valleys between are cut in softer shale and limestone, and on the southeast the whole group stops at the Rome Fault, where the Great Valley begins.

Taylor Ridge is the long one. It runs about forty miles north through Chattooga, Walker, Whitfield and Catoosa counties and is highest, at 1,665 feet, where Dicks Ridge meets it. It carries the name of Richard Taylor, a Cherokee chief, and locals have long called it Taylor’s Ridge whatever the maps say. At Ringgold Gap it breaks for the interstate and the railroad and goes on north as White Oak Mountain. The Pinhoti Trail follows the crests.

The national forest holds the middle of the group. On Johns Mountain, Keown Falls drops about 35 feet off an overhanging bluff, close to a trickle except after rain, and the trail runs through the grotto behind it. From the overlook at the end of the forest road on top you look across the Armuchee Valley to Taylor Ridge. One ridge over lies The Pocket, a hollow between Horn and Mill mountains named for the pockets of iron ore in the ridges. Two communities, Pocket and Zone, lived there from the mid-1800s into the 1930s. A Civilian Conservation Corps company camped there from 1938 to 1942, and its spring box still lets cold water out into Spring Branch.

The ridges have served as walls in war. In May 1864 Joseph Johnston dug in along Rocky Face Ridge above Dalton. Sherman held him in place with attacks at Mill Creek Gap and Dug Gap and sent a third column south through Snake Creek Gap toward the railroad at Resaca, and the Confederates had to leave a position they had not lost.