Cohutta Springs (east)

This blog includes two communities, both of which were known as Cohutta Springs. This post describes Cohutta Springs (east).

Cohutta Springs (east) is the location of an old historic mineral springs. It was a resort area featuring a hotel, boarding houses, cabins, and accessible mineral springs, thought to be of medicinal value. There were doctors and pharmacists there at various times. In the 1860s, Myra Inman, of Cleveland, Tennessee, summered there. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, once stayed there. It is near the old Summerour Chapel. Later, there was Old Summerour Methodist Church; and now, Amazing Grace Baptist Church. The history of the area is evident in the names of the cemeteries and streets. Amazing Grace Baptist Church is now the only church on Summerour Church Road. The Summerour Methodist Cemetery is across from there, and Old Summerour Cemetery is just east/northeast of there, across the railroad tracks. Summerour Church Road runs into Cohutta Springs Road. Both roads intersect U.S. Highway 411 on the west.

Cohutta Springs Road leads to the old mineral springs area, which is now on private property. Cohutta Springs Conference Center, owned by the Georgia Cumberland Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists, owns part of the land near there. The mill ruins may be on their property. The property on the south side of the road, where the old hotel ruins are, is owned by other neighbors.

Cohutta Springs in the 1860s

By the 1860s, several boarding houses and resorts had located around the old mineral springs at Cohutta Springs in the 2nd Section of Murray County (Cohutta Springs, east). Water was an important commodity, then as now. People would dip drinking water from the wellspring. Also at the eastern Cohutta Springs were some boarding houses and resorts. People came to summer at the mountain spring, as respite from the summer heat.

One young lady, Myra Inman, of Cleveland, Tennessee, writes about Cohutta Springs in her diary. Her family summered at Cohutta Springs, not long before the Yankees came into Cleveland. Cohutta Springs is also mentioned in Sara Wadley's diary. Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy stayed at Cohutta Springs one summer, early in the War (before the Atlanta Campaign brought the Yankees into Georgia). Wadley (as I read between the lines of her diary) may have had a crush on a young man who was Stephens' secretary. These diary entries refer to Cohutta Springs, east. Myra Inman places the location as about two miles from Summerhour's. The mineral springs is on what is now Cohutta Springs Road, Crandall, Georgia (off of U.S. Highway 411).

Cohutta Springs, west: Thomas Calloway, of Cleveland, Tennessee, and his nephew, Callaway Campbell, owned land near Waterhouse's at the "other" Cohutta Springs (five miles west of the mineral springs). That Cohutta Springs was on the Spring Place and Cleveland Road (now Georgia Highway 225, where Hall's Chapel Road and Georgia Highway 2 intersects 225). The area was scouted by Union soldiers in 1864. Colonel Eli Long, U.S.A., camped at Waterhouse's plantation in February 1864, en route to the First Battle of Dalton.


(Note: I did a quick Wikipedia lookup to verify the name of the vice president of the Confederacy.)

Clearer references to the Myra Inman diary (book), Sara Wadley diary (on-line excerpts), and the Callaway Campbell letters (library holdings) will be given later.