Fort Mountain

The wall

Along the top of Fort Mountain runs a line of piled stone, laid without mortar, following the contour of the ridge for something like 855 to 930 feet. The figure depends on who did the measuring. The Sherpa guide describes it as two to six feet high now and probably taller once, with round pits about ten feet across set into it every thirty feet or so. Philip Smith of the University of Georgia excavated part of it, reporting in 1962, and found nothing diagnostic, nothing that would date it. The National Register nomination that followed called it more of a marker than a fortification. The mountain is named for the fort it probably never was.

Who built it is still open, and each answer has its own sponsor. Georgia State Parks says it is thought to be the work of early Indians, for defense or for ceremony. The Sherpa guide favors Woodland people around A.D. 500 and says the wall’s ends line up with sunrise and sunset at the equinoxes, a claim nobody seems to have surveyed. Some geologists, by the same guide, read the “wall” as the weathered remains of a hard caprock layer and no wall at all. Nineteenth-century writers gave it to Hernando de Soto, which one historian answered by pointing out that de Soto spent less than two weeks in the area. A legend of the Welsh prince Madoc made it onto a park plaque, which the park has since taken down. Another credits the moon-eyed people, a race said to have come before the Cherokee. With nothing datable from the dig, none of these has evidence beyond the stones themselves.

Tower and park

Ivan Allen Sr. bought the mountaintop in 1926 and gave it to the state in 1936, according to the nomination. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the lake, the trails and a stone tower at the summit, which the park calls a fire tower and the Sherpa guide describes as a 38-foot observation tower about 520 feet north of the wall, with a heart-shaped stone set over the east window.

Edge of the mountains

Fort Mountain is where the Cohutta Mountains end on the southwest, and the Blue Ridge with them. The range stands a thousand to fifteen hundred feet over the limestone valley around Chatsworth, and the Chatsworth overlook looks straight out across it. The Gahuti Trail’s first stretch looks the other way, into the Cohutta Wilderness. The Sherpa guide describes the woods as scarlet oak, Virginia pine and old twisted white oak, with chestnut oak around the rock outcrops and, unusually for the trail, Catawba rhododendron. The park’s own description is hardwood forest and blueberry thickets.

There’s money in the rock too. The nomination records gold around the mountain on an 1889 map and the Cohutta Gold Mining Company’s shafts and stamp mill of about 1901, and a talc mine on the lower west side. Sherpa calls the mountain probably Georgia’s leading talc producer and says mines surround it on three sides. You can see two of them from the Chatsworth overlook.