Just Milling about Cherokee County
by Bruce Baker
Prior to the advent of plentiful electrical power, waterpower was used to energize industrial equipment. Cherokee County, being blessed with several streams and rivers, was home to as many as fifty such businesses, known collectively as mills. Back in the day a mill essentially made use of a locally sourced raw material (wood for a sawmill, grain for a gristmill, etc.) and converted it to a salable product. After the Civil War ended, rural Cherokee County was composed of mostly subsistence farmers, but the one real cash crop they grew was cotton.
Most of us have heard the story of how R.T. Jones Sr. founded the Canton Cotton Mills in 1900; I will at some point tell that tale, but that is for another day. Today I want to share the story of the Cherokee Cotton Mill, an earlier mill that took cotton fibers and twisted them into yarns, then twisted the yarns into strands, and finally twisted those strands into rope. The twist of each component is opposite to the next, and that helps hold the rope together. You can see the remains of this mill today, in Rope Mill Park.
The origins of this facility, and in fact the origins of the entire area, aren’t very well documented. Many call it Toonigh, and there are no less than a half dozen differing explanations as to how the area came to be called that. On maps it’s typically shown as Lebanon, a name it inherited later when Postmaster Barrett opted to call his post office Lebanon after a church he attended nearby, despite all the other businesses and churches referring to the area as Toonigh. A Toonigh Post Office ledger has entries back to 1887, but the area was settled prior to that.
Perhaps the greatest source of confusion arises from the fact that "Cherokee Mill" and "Cherokee Cotton Mill" refer to two different mills, the former being a gristmill on Little River that predated the rope mill. Built in 1836 of wood construction and multi-story, it was located very near where the Little River empties into the Etowah River. Photos of it sometimes mistakenly call it the Rope Mill, but the Rope Mill, “Cherokee Cotton Mill,” was of brick construction, and single story.
Image: 1927 Etowah Basin Development Map for Georgia Power
There are deed records of a yarn mill operating at the site as far back as 1882, and of a Sheriff’s sale of the property because of a suit brought by one owner (Thomas Evans) against another (Joel Haley), but this again has been poorly documented. The picture becomes clearer just prior to 1900, when a man named John S. Dorn acquired the property and constructed a rope mill which was initially referred to as the Litter River Mill (as I said earlier, confusion reigns!), but eventually came to do business under the name Cherokee Cotton Mill. Locals, however, habitually preferred simply to call it “the Rope Mill.”
Modern ropemaking is much different; in that day a long building called a ropewalk was needed, and in this instance, it was a brick structure around 200 feet long, built on a rock foundation. A dam was built just upstream that had a headgate, which when opened would divert water into the narrowly constructed mill race. Water then pushed a horizontally mounted wheel, known as a turbine, which provided the necessary power to operate the facility. The turbine rested within a turbine pit; water flowed in from the race via an opening, turning the turbine before being forced out the bottom and back into the river. The entire production process took place in that one long building, starting with cotton bales being brought into “picker rooms” where it was cleaned and any debris removed. The mill produced cotton rope, which was used for plow lines, well rope of varying length for use in water wells, and during World War II supplied the US Army tent rope.
The initial part of the process runs just like a textile mill using cotton; only after reaching the yarn stage does the process change to produce rope instead of cloth. Regardless of what they produce, cotton mills are fire hazards because of the lint that’s inherent in the processing, and there were several fires over the years at this mill, although none did extensive damage. At the top of the hill a large water tank was installed, which fed a sprinkler system that could be engaged if a fire broke out. The mill employed around twenty workers, mostly men as reported in the 1910 census but later several women worked in the mill also. A flood in 1923 damaged the dam, and Mr. Dorn repaired it, expanding the operation also at that time.
In 1928, when John Dorn sold the property to the Georgia Power Company, the mill was a fairly modernized operation. The power company had intentions of building a privately operated hydroelectric dam on the Etowah and was buying up land necessary to house the lake that would feed this dam. Later Congress would pass Flood Control Acts in 1941 and 1944, which resulted in the Army Corps of Engineers ultimately constructing the Allatoona Dam. Construction was delayed, however, by World War II and wouldn’t begin until 1946 and the dam wouldn’t be operational until January of 1950.
Image: Employees of the Rope Mill, date unknown.
And so it was that two brothers Smith L. Johnston and Joe E. Johnston, leased the property from the Georgia Power Company in the late twenties and continued operating the mill. It had an inherent cost advantage over other mills because of the inexpensive waterpower, although at times diesel power was needed to continue to operate the turbine when the water supply simply wasn’t enough to meet all the operational power needs. In an interview with Smith’s son (also named Smith), he recalls working at the mill prior to serving in World War II and doing so part-time after returning from the War. He says there were seven houses nearby where the mills full-time employees lived. The Johnstons would operate the mill under a series of three-year leases, right up until September of 1949, when the Corps of Engineers took it over.
Sadly, the Corps removed the building and the dam, and so today only foundations and a few minor pieces of the operation remain in place. Today the area houses Rope Mill Park, with extensive dual-purpose mountain biking and hiking trails that are well worth exploring. And if you know the right path (it isn’t marked), you can also follow a trail from there that ultimately leads to an area once known as Hause Shoals, where a 20 foot waterfall known alternately as either Toonigh Falls or Allatoona Falls is one of the prettiest spots in Cherokee County.