Tallulah River

From Standing Indian

The Tallulah rises in Clay County, North Carolina, near Standing Indian Mountain, inside the Southern Nantahala Wilderness. The Geological Survey keeps a benchmark gage near Clayton, about two kilometres above Lake Burton. The basin above it drains 146 square kilometres, about 56 square miles, climbing from 573 metres at the gage to 1,676 at the summit of Standing Indian. All of it lies within national forest boundaries and 32 percent of it is wilderness. Powell’s Gazetteer runs the Nantahala range fifty miles southeast as far as Tallulah Falls.

The river runs south into Georgia through Towns and Rabun counties, takes in the Coleman River, and ends in Habersham County. The federal hydrography data give it 47.7 miles. At Lake Tugalo it meets the Chattooga, and the water leaving the lake is the Tugaloo, bound for the Savannah. Charles Wharton grouped the two rivers together in 1978 as the Savannah headwaters of Georgia’s Blue Ridge.

A stair of lakes

Georgia Railway and Power completed the Tallulah Falls dam in 1913. By the New Georgia Encyclopedia’s figures it stands 116 feet high and 400 long, holds a 63-acre lake, and feeds a tunnel 6,666 feet long working under a head of 608 feet. Wikipedia says its power ran Atlanta’s streetcars. Helen Dortch Longstreet’s Tallulah Falls Conservation Association, formed in 1911, sued the power company and lost in 1913. More dams followed upstream. By Wikipedia’s account, the one at Lake Burton was finished on December 22, 1919, over 2,775 acres, and the town of Burton, sixty-five families, was bought out and pulled down. From the top the chain now runs Lake Burton, Lake Seed, Lake Rabun and Tallulah Falls Lake.

The gorge

Below the last dam the river enters Tallulah Gorge, about two miles long and close to a thousand feet deep by Wikipedia’s figure, over a thousand by the Atlanta paper’s. The Encyclopedia describes the falls as four main cataracts dropping about 350 feet in a mile. The geologist R. D. Hatcher read the Tallulah Falls Dome in 1974 as one set of folds laid across another. Its plants sort by moisture, from dwarfed table mountain and pitch pine on the dry rims to tulip poplar, beech and Carolina hemlock in the damp coves, with sweetgum, alder and sycamore on the river bars. Wharton and the Georgia Botanical Society both record the green salamander here. The railroad reached the falls in 1882, and on July 18, 1970, Karl Wallenda walked a wire across the gorge with two headstands on the way. The state park came in 1992.