The building of Carters Dam, Part 2

Regional historian Greg Cockburn, of Dalton, recalls meeting a student from the archaeology department of the University of Georgia when Carters Dam was under construction in the 1960s — and some of the group’s discoveries there.

“It was over 50 years ago, and I don’t remember her name or where she was from,” he said. “All I remember is that she lived in a trailer just above Central on (Highway) 225 with other students working there in the summer. They used trowels, paintbrushes and sifters, and worked in grids laid out with string and wooden stakes. The day I was there, they were working in one of the village’s garbage pits, where along with shells, fish and bird bones, they found the bones of a human baby.”

Historians note there were two distinct Native American inhabitations in the area that came to be known as Carters, named after Farish Carter, an early owner of the historic Carters Quarters home off Old Federal Road. The most recent settlement was around 700 years ago, according to a former UGA professor and archaeologist, Dr. A.R. Kelly, who worked at the site during the dam’s construction. The other era goes back thousands of years, according to The Coosawattee Foundation (coosawattee.org).

Cockburn said he visited the site for another reason rather than just being interested in a girl, however.

“Having grown up hunting arrowheads, I was very interested in Indian history and went down to the site they were excavating a few days and watched them at work,” he continued. “My dad served in the Army Aviation Engineers during World War II and worked on landing strip construction in the jungles of islands in the South Pacific — he had the engineer pins on his uniform.”

Cockburn’s father, (Steven “Lee”), was “fascinated” with the construction of the dam.

“We made multiple trips over there to watch its progress when I was 12 or 13,” he said. “I can remember guys suspended on ropes swinging back and forth as they cut down trees on the sheer rock wall where they drilled the tunnel to divert the (Coosawattee) river through.”

Greg Cockburn did some research and found an Aug. 1, 1963, article from The Red and Black (UGA newspaper) titled “Students unearth Etowah remains” by John LaRosch. Dr. Kelly stated in the piece, “This area is valuable to us for its historical resources. The Cherokee lived here before their removal, and all around this area are mounds and burials of tribesmen. The mounds were built in several levels, and the ones on which we are working are believed to be of a religious nature.”

The 16 professors and students were “fighting a battle against time.”

“When the river is rerouted (through mountain rock so the dam could be built in the riverbed), all of this area will be covered, and the history will be lost,” Kelly explained almost 60 years ago. “These diggings are almost 700 years old. The culture was marked by very elaborate burial sites, and the dead carried with them special ornaments.”

The team only removed dirt an inch at a time, and carefully marked rocks and charted them on a master sheet for reconstruction later, the article detailed.

‘They would be fired’

Max Frady, of Ellijay, said the late Ernest Clark, a heavy equipment operator, helped with grading at the dam site.

“He said (construction management) told the employees if they found any Native American artifacts and didn’t turn them in to government officials, they would be fired,” he related.

Bill Moore, who worked as a surveyor at the dam construction site in the 1960s, said geologists and others knew the area had American Indian history.

“Where Talking Rock (Creek) and the Coosawattee (River) came together, there was an Indian camp where they came to fish,” he said. “Every summer, two or three archaeologists (from UGA) would come up here and hire these Murray County High School kids, boys and girls, load ‘em on a school bus every morning and bring ‘em down here, and they would be the ones doing the physical digging (for relics), with the paintbrushes and all that. They found graves and everything; they didn’t take photos but they would have a sketch artist. And when they found something, they would lay out the bones or whatever and sketch it. He could make it look almost like a photograph.

“But they were in a hurry to get as much data as they could before the waters backed up.”

Greg Cockburn added, “The professor featured in the article made multiple digs over a several-year period from the early ‘60s to the early ‘70s. I remember reading through academic papers about his early work in the basement of the old UGA library, and I’m pretty sure that they would still have them.”

Jimmy Densmore, of Dalton, was researching the stone wall at Fort Mountain and shared information he found about the Indian villages known as the “Little Egypt” archaeological site found at what came to be known as the Carters area. The site included “platform mounds surrounding a plaza and a large village area” destroyed by construction of Carters Dam,   according to “Late Prehistoric/Early Historic Chiefdoms (circa AD 1300-1850)” in the New Georgia Encyclopedia.

Regional historian Leslie Thomas, curator of the Tabor House & Civil War Museum in Ellijay, shared that the site of “Coosawattee Town” was located at the confluence of the Coosawattee River and Talking Rock Creek in Murray County.

“It is now under the regulation dam adjoining Carters Lake that was created in 1976,” she said. “After the visit by the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in late 1540, the Coosa Chiefdom collapsed between 1600-1650. They migrated to other sites in Alabama. The Little Egypt site was later reoccupied by the Cherokee, who renamed the village Coosawattee Town, or Kusawati-yi, which meant Old Creek Place.”

‘Striking’ gold

Moore said a superintendent for the contractor deduced there would have to be gold at the dam site considering the region’s geology.

“When we uncovered the (river) bottom — they washed it and blew it and it was as clean as it could be before you could put any (construction) material in there — the superintendent for the contractor was out there one day,” he recollected. “He was a University of South Carolina graduate in geology, and he said, ‘We are the first human beings to ever lay eyes on the bottom of this river since God created it. They discovered gold over here in Dahlonega, 25 or 30 miles away; I bet there’s gold in these pools in the bottom. Anywhere there’s black sand in these holes there’s gold.’”

The superintendent/geologist directed 25 laborers “with all the 2-gallon buckets you can find” to go and get the black sand out of the holes in the riverbed.

“The gold will be at the very bottom,” he told Moore.

Garvin Wilbanks, who ran for Murray County sheriff a couple of times, according to Moore, used a sluice he constructed to look for the gold in the black sand.

“(The superintendent) had Garvin build this sluice, and he used a garden hose and would gently rock it back and forth so the gold would lodge in the ridges (of the sluice),” Moore said of Wilbanks. “The superintendent knew how to recover the gold using mercury. And we wound up with one of these little prescription (medicine) bottles about two-thirds full of gold dust. You wouldn’t believe how heavy it was!”

However, it took a week’s worth of work to get that much, and the superintendent told the workers “Forget about it, don’t worry about gold,” Moore said. “He had it on his shelf in the office there as a conversation piece, and then somebody stole it.”

Some might find the theft incident ironic since the Cherokee were essentially forced off their ancestral land in north Georgia around 120 years earlier because of white settlers’ discovery of gold — and their greed for the precious ore.