A Bit of Cherokee History Carved in Stone
by Bruce Baker
As you’ve no doubt discovered if you’ve been reading my posts for long, Cherokee County lies within the Georgia Gold Belt. Gold has contributed significantly to the economy throughout time. In fact, mining for gold even predates the Cherokee peoples settling in this region. It may come as a surprise, however, for you to discover that as valuable as it is, gold isn’t the greatest mineral wealth in this county’s history. That honor belongs to metamorphosed limestone, also known as marble.
The range of marbles found and mined in Cherokee, Pickens, and Gilmer Counties is vast, including Creole Marble (which is white, and blue/black), Etowah Marble (which comes in pink, salmon, and rose shades), and Murphy Marble (which is white). To give you some idea of just how significant North Georgia Marble is on the world stage, here is just a few examples of structures constructed of one or more of these marble types, mined right here.
(Left to Right): U. S. Capitol, Washington D.C.; the Federal Reserve Board Building, Washington D.C.; the John Adams Building, Washington D.C.; the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Cleveland, OH.
(Left to Right): Swan Street Building, New York City, NY; the Chicago Water Tower, Chicago, IL; the National Aeronautical and Aerospace Museum, Washington D.C.; Lincoln Memorial, in Washington D.C.
More than half of all the headstones at Arlington National Cemetery, in Washington DC, and 60% of all the national monuments & memorials in Washington DC, were wrought from North Georgia marble. As impressive as all this may sound, it’s estimated that at most only around 10-15% of the marble available here has been quarried.
Locally, you can see this same marble as the building materials of One Georgia Center in Atlanta, of the Tate House in Pickens County, and of the Cherokee County Courthouse in Canton. At the center of all this industry is Nelson, GA, which sits in both Cherokee and Pickens County. The founding of the marble industry in the area is what ultimately drove the railroads to expand from Marietta to what we today know as Nelson in 1883, and the story of the man who built the Georgia Marble Company, one Colonel Stephen C. Tate, is worth telling.
Stephen was born in 1832 and moved to Pickens County (then still Cherokee County) at a young age. At age 20, he left for California to mine gold, but by 1855, he was back in Georgia, operating a business in Cartersville.In 1857 he married Eliza Buffington, of Griffin, Georgia.He then enlisted in the Civil War. At its end he found himself back on the family homestead in Pickens County, whereupon Stephen turned his attention to the development of a marble industry.
Marble is heavy, and expensive to transport; he became instrumental in bringing the railroad to Nelson in order to service his fledgling business.At the same time, he was buying out as many of the local marble businesses that would sell to consolidate the industry.In 1884, he officially founded the Georgia Marble Company, and by the time of his death in April of 1901, he was the Vice President of the Georgia Marble Company of Tate, GA, the Blue Ridge Marble Company of Nelson, GA, and the Kennesaw Marble Company of Marietta, GA.Not everyone was willing to sell out; one company in particular, the Georgia Marble Finishing Works of Canton, Georgia, was operating independently well into the late 1940’s.
Image: Georgia Marble Company Quarry at Tate, Georgia
In that day and age, structural stone was the material of choice for large buildings; these days, steel girders and concrete dominate the building industry.While building standards of today may not employ solid marble often, marble facades on buildings remain popular, as do marble monuments and memorials.Setting industrial economics aside for the moment, one of the proudest accomplishments of this industry may have been its inclusivity.It recruited immigrants as mining experts from Scotland and Ireland, and marble workers and stone cutters from Italy, and set them to work alongside both white and black Americans to share their expertise.One of the reasons for their success, undoubtedly, was their willingness to bring in experts from all over the globe, and to use them to educate anyone and everyone locally that was willing to work in order to gain that expertise that they had so diligently recruited.
Cherokee County flourished to a great degree because of the existence of, and further development of, cutting edge transportation options connecting it with the world at large.In the days prior to European migration, the Etowah River served as the conduit.Thanks in part to Georgia Marble, the railroad (whole portions of which run alongside the Etowah) served as the next game-changing transportation conduit.More recently, the development of the I-575 corridor of the Interstate Highway System (initially conceived and created at the direction of President Eisenhower) serves as the most current iteration of state of the art transportation options… but that again, is yet another story, best left for another day.