Conasauga River

Out of the Cohuttas

The Conasauga rises in the Cohutta Mountains of north Georgia at about 2,400 feet. Its upper course lies in the Cohutta Wilderness, which holds about fifteen miles of the river. Logging railroads were laid by hand up this valley and the Jacks, and by the guidebook account the Conasauga drainage was cut over by 1928. The river trail follows the old grade. Below the wilderness the Jacks River comes in, at a confluence the Fish and Wildlife Service places in Polk County, Tennessee, and the river returns to Georgia through the farm country of Murray County. It ends near Calhoun at about 620 feet, where it meets the Coosawattee and the two become the Oostanaula. The water reaches the Gulf by way of the Coosa and the Mobile basin. The federal hydrography data give it 93 miles. The federal names database records Connasauga, Connesauga, Conne-san-ga and Slave River as variant names.

Seventy-five to ninety fishes

The counts depend on who is counting. A 2024 study in Ecology of Freshwater Fish gives more than 75 species, the Fish and Wildlife Service about 90, and an older Forest Service page more than 90. An archived Forest Service count gives 25 surviving of 42 mussel species known from the river. The Natural Resources Conservation Service counts ten federally listed fishes and mussels.

The Conasauga logperch, Percina jenkinsi, was described by Bruce Thompson in 1985 and listed as endangered on August 5 of that year. Its historic range was a 34-mile reach from the mouth of the Jacks down to Mitchell Bridge in Murray County. It now holds about eleven miles of that. A genetic study from fish sampled in 2010 and 2012 put its effective population at 114. The amber darter is also listed as endangered here, and the blue shiner, the trispot darter and, since March 2023, the frecklebelly madtom as threatened.

Below the wilderness

The listed fishes live below the wilderness boundary, between the Jacks confluence and Mitchell Bridge. Six shoals sampled in most years from 1996 to 2022 show total fish numbers falling by about two percent a year, with crevice-spawning minnows and the smaller fishes going fastest. The Fish and Wildlife Service reported a 2017 study that found declines in every one of 26 monitored species, and the amber darter went undetected from 1996 to 2018. Near Dalton the carpet industry draws up to a third of the river’s summer flow, and Wikipedia, citing a 2008 study, reports perfluorinated stain-resisting compounds carried downstream. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2023 account adds farm runoff and sewage overflows from Chatsworth, Dalton and Calhoun.