A Walk in the Woods

This afternoon we took a walk in the woods in Sweetwater State Park, up the blue-blazed trail through the shade of lollolly pines, American beech, sweetgum, slippery elm, and burr oak. The day was beautiful: clear, bright sunny skies and temperatures in the 50s (Farhenheit). I had tested the temperature at the sunny, south side of the house before we left home and thought the air warmer than it really was. When we arrived at the park, the wind was blowing cold off the water of George Sparks Reservoir. Canada geese, coots, and large white geese waddled across the lawn near the lake where we had parked first, but then we drove up to the interpretive center, re-parked, and began our walk through the woods.

Little streams ran through the woods, and once we stopped to turn over rocks, but Tom didn't find anything of interest beneath them. The blue-blazed trail switchbacked up a bluff and then down to the creek, where the remains of an old mill still stands. This mill was once part of a small creek-side settlement before the Civil War. Slaves made the bricks from which the mill was built, and poor white women did the mill work while their husbands were away fighting the war. In 1864, Union soldiers burned the mill, freed the slaves, and loaded up the women and children for transportation to prison in Kentucky. Many of the people never returned...but evidence of their work remains. The old millchase still channels some of the creek toward the mill, but the water returns to the creek through collapsed stone walls of the millchase before reaching the mill. Some walls of the mill stand, and piles of broken brick peek brightly from beneath their thick cover of earth.

Two weeks ago, a lot of countryside around Sweetwater Creek and the Chattahoochee River was underwater, and some roads still remain closed. The trail to the falls was closed with yellow tape across the trail, but we stepped over some of the yellow tape in order to get a closer look at the creek. There in the rocks that tumble downstream and pile up along the banks, I saw small pieces of brick, probably from the mill, that had tumbled and settled with the rocks. Some of the brick pieces were as round and smooth as the tumbled rock, and could have been taken for rock except that their red color stood out among the quartz, gneiss, and mica schist, as illustrated in the photo at the upper left-hand corner of this post. Given enough time, Mother Nature reclaims all that we have ever dared to call our own.