Cohutta Mountains

The Cohutta Mountains are where the Blue Ridge runs out. They rise east of Chatsworth, Georgia, a thousand to fifteen hundred feet above the limestone valley at their feet, and run northeast through Murray, Gilmer, and Fannin counties to the Tennessee line, where Big Frog Mountain stands at 4,224 feet on the divide between the Tennessee and Coosa basins. The state’s own geologic survey has called the range the end of the Unaka chain, and Charles Wharton gave the Cohuttas their own district of Georgia’s Blue Ridge in 1978. The atlas carries the range across the line to the Ocoee River, which is its own choice; the Georgia sources stop at the border.

What sets the Cohuttas apart is the water that leaves them. The Jacks and the Conasauga drain the core of the range to the Coosa and the Gulf, through one of the largest wilderness areas in the eastern United States: the Cohutta Wilderness, Georgia’s first, designated in 1975, and the Big Frog Wilderness across the line, together about 45,000 acres. The Jacks River Trail crosses its river some forty times. The Conasauga, 93 miles from its source in the Cohuttas to the Oostanaula at Calhoun, holds somewhere between 75 and 90 fish species depending on who counts, among them the Conasauga logperch, which lives in an eleven-mile reach of this one river and nowhere else on earth. The listed fishes live below the wilderness, in the farm country between the Jacks confluence and Mitchell Bridge, and the shoal counts there have fallen about two percent a year since 1996. The wild river and the endangered one are the same river, a few miles apart.

By the Forest Service’s estimate, about seventy percent of the present wilderness was logged between 1915 and 1930. By the guidebook account, camps of eighty to a hundred men worked rails laid by hand up both rivers, the Conasauga drainage was finished in 1928, the Jacks begun in 1929, and the rails came out in 1937. Both river trails follow the old grade. What has grown back is oak and pine on the ridges and hardwood in the coves, with hemlocks along the Conasauga and the standing skeletons of chestnut. On Grassy Mountain, outside the wilderness, Georgia ForestWatch counts nearly two thousand acres of old growth, the largest known tract in north Georgia, and above it sits Lake Conasauga, a nineteen-acre pool the Civilian Conservation Corps built at about 3,150 feet.

Fort Mountain closes the range on the southwest. Along its summit runs a stone wall some 855 to 930 feet long, depending on who measured, that an archaeologist dug into in 1962 and could not date. The National Register nomination calls it a marker rather than a fortification; the park has removed the plaque that once credited a Welsh prince. In 1838 the Cherokee of the Ellijay and Cartecay valleys were gathered at Fort Hetzel, which by Sarah Hill’s count from the records sent 884 of them west, while cavalry pursued the ones who fled onto Big Frog. Gilmer County turned to apples when the boll weevil took its cotton in the 1920s. Across the Ocoee, the Copper Basin’s smelters stripped 32,000 acres bare and the ground is still being put back.