The Attic Dream
Do you have a dream . . . that haunts you? I do. Beginning when I was an undergraduate - many, many years ago - I dreamed of a dusty attic. In my dream, just getting into that attic was a struggle. For one reason or another, it was hard to reach the allusive attic door. Once opened, I was eager to explore that secret place. A long dim-lit hallway stood before me with several open rooms on either side. Each room was unique, but all were filled with dusty, neglected treasures that I wanted to explore. Just as I began to dig in, it was over - I woke up.
Dream after dream, I struggled to reach the attic door to explore. Each time I would go deeper into the spacing trying to piece together narratives.
Many years after the dream began, I discovered a new door. Far in the back at the end of the hall, I entered the mysterious room, only to find it desolate. The only thing in the room was a chair and light streaming through a filthy window. No air, no life - the room was empty. No stories, no oral histories, no artifacts, no past, no present, no future. Empty.
For years, the dream confused me, and then it stopped. I stopped having the dream. Because I was living the dream. The metaphor is obvious - this had become my life - finding hidden, lost things and writing about them. Once I could overcome my writing anxiety, I began telling stories - histories of places. Writers and historians know the magic - no, the power of place. Just being in the place allows questions to surface and narratives to form.
The Journey began in Cassville
For me, this attic journey began while driving through Cassville, Georgia to take my sons to school. It always felt like something was missing. It was a three-way stop to nowhere. There was something mysterious about this place and it was daring me to find out more and share its story.
I soon found out that in the 1840s and 50s Cassville, that three-way stop to nowhere, was the largest city between Chattanooga and Atlanta. I was the county seat with a courthouse and many lawyers. The town had two colleges, more than one newspaper, theaters and acting groups, and lots of stores. That was the start of my first book, Lost Towns of North Georgia. I would start with the question WHY? What happened? Where did those towns go or why did their purpose change? In that book, I discovered mill towns, mine towns, ancient towns, and drowned towns. I wanted to dive deeper into those drowned towns and dig down into the mill towns.
I grew up on Lake Erie. Soon after we got married, my Georgia-born husband went to the Lake in Buffalo, NY. I remember his strange observation. He told someone, “You can’t see the other side.” I realized that he had never seen a natural lake because Georgia does not have even one natural lake. He had only seen lakes created by humans. I would go to the human-made lakes of North Georgia and wonder why they existed. I expanded my first book to the drowned towns and my most popular book, Underwater Ghost Towns of North Georgia. I was not finished looking at special places and my elegies of lost things continued.
Dotted all over Georgia are stoic smoke stacks and the remains of textile mills and the surrounding company towns. I wondered what happened to the lost industry and I wrote Lost Mill Towns of North Georgia.
I was trying to tag all the scattered pieces of history - putting together creative nonfiction narratives - writing the truest sentences I could. Pulling out hidden history and lost places out of the metaphoric attic before there was nothing left to write about. These stories give our community personality, but if we do not find a way to preserve our past they will be buried.
Progress can be a terrible thing
I have watched Atlanta creep up I 75 North. I think progress can be suffocating.
The Atlanta Regional Commission forecasts the 21-county Atlanta region will potentially add 2.9 million people by 2050, bringing the region’s total population to 8.6 million. To put that growth in perspective, it’s as if all of metropolitan Denver will move to the Atlanta region over the next 30 years. (https://atlantaregional.org/atlanta-region/population-employment-forecasts/#:~:text=Forecast%20Highlights,over%20the%20next%2030%20years.)
What was once “out in the country” is now claustrophobic, and suburbanized. Already our red clay paradise has been bulldozed for wider roads, bigger schools, and more restaurant chains. IT IS TIME TO PRESERVE PLACE—to PROTECT PLACE to salvage our community character - the only thing that puts progress into perspective
In the 1960s singer-songwriter, Joni Mitchell described what is happening here in her folk song, “The Big Yellow Taxi.”
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone?
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
Amy Grant sings my favorite version:
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I wonder what early Georgia explorers, pioneers, and Native Americans would have thought of this “progress.”
In the late 1700s, explorer William Bartram walked across North Georgia. He wrote in Bartram’s Travels about a place Native Americans called The Enchanted Land. He described a forested land teeming with wild rivers:
“….this space may be called the hilly country, every where fertile and delightful, continually replenished by innumerable rivulets, either coursing about the fragrant hills, or springing from the rocky precipices and forming many cascades; the coolness and purity of which waters invigorate the air of this otherwise hot and sultry climate.” (https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/bartram/bartram.html)
But progress demanded those wild rivers be damned. North Georgia needed cheap power at the turn of the 20th century, so dam companies began plugging our rivers (or rivulets) to create human-created lakes.
Place
Let me pause here to emphasize again the power of place. Place is sacred. We are our surroundings. We are our land. We are our rivers. We are the history of these places.
But we as a generation, as a society, as a people have lost our roots. In the wake of progress, we have allowed our history to be plowed over, drowned, and forgotten. Georgia history has crumbled into the red dirt and plowed under while we write new narratives, and the truth is uprooted and cleared away.
Like the empty room in my dream, there is a vacuum. We are left with nothing to connect us to our past and ground us in our present.
So much of our history is already lost. We have carelessly put our treasures away and hoarded history. Some things have slipped through our hands and the truth evades us as we are dependent on Google searches that take us to many falsehoods. We have done a terrible job of preserving our personal histories.
Rootless
Our world today feels rootless. Covid 19, mass shootings, civil unrest ..this all contributes to an uprooted society. We have lost our collective community identity. I believe history is how we restore connections. When we learn from our past and open our minds to a slightly different perspective, we can move toward a future that honors differences.
So how do we allow progress but keep our identity? By preserving history. By rescuing hidden history and telling our stories. By filling that empty room. We need to fill the room.
We need to go back to the sacred places where history began - and take a look. Let’s go once more to the Lake. Lake Allatoona.
Once More to the Lake
On any given day you will see boaters, swimmers and people fishing on the Lake. What most people do not see is what lies beneath. Look closer - careful do not fall in. Gliding along the green murky, yet glass-like water lean in to see 50, 100, 150 feet down. You may not know that at one time there were actual communities down there, these are the drowned towns.
When the Army Corp of Engineers had orders to damn the Etowah River, the towns of Abernathysville, Allatoona, Macedonia, Gladesville, and Etowah disappeared. You may be fishing over the pre-Civil War industrial town of Etowah - established by the Iron Man of Georgia, Mark Anthony Cooper.
Cooper brought industry and the railroad to Bartow County Georgia in the early 1830s. He was a progressive businessman. His company town, Etowah - was named for the river that ran through it. The company town had iron furnaces, flouring mills, rolling mills. Beside the worker’s homes there was a store, church and a school - everything a little town needed.
Cooper had it all, but he invested in the Confederacy and lost everything. Then the Union army did its final work, they left very little of the former industrial complex and his worker’s homes. Glen Holly, the family home barely survived the War. And they filled the cemetery with fallen family members.
In 1941, the Army Corps of Engineers began preparing the land around the Etowah River for impoundment. While land was purchased, the Corps began dismantling homes and farms for the coming waters. The Cooper family insisted - and fought for - a new family burial ground before the waters came, burying their past under 150 of water close to the Allatoona Dam. A green copper plate at Oak Hill Cemetery in Cartersville, GA tells the rest of the story:
This family cemetery containing eleven graves was removed from Glen
Holly in 1949 to permit construction of Allatoona Dam and Reservoir.
The Coopers filled the room. If not for the Cooper family - who saved everything - every document, artifact, and even slips of paper we would never know the Coopers or the lost town of Etowah. They filled their room and turned around and gave it to us - to help save our community identity.
How to Fill the Room
In my dream, the empty room compelled me. This was the saddest part of the attic. Nothing was in the room because families ignored their stories. The room is silent because no one bothered to ask questions and record narratives. People trashed their artifacts. History died in this room.
How do we fill the room after years of neglect? Sometimes, it is too late. Fiction writers and folk loreists rush in and fill the air with half-truths. We get to watch these stories riddled with fake news on television programs masquerading as true tales. These stories are more intriguing when we know the whole truth. The facts are much better than fiction.
So, how can we fill the room?
1. Support local history. Help them cultivate our collective community character. Enable the history collectors to make our past open and accessible by making history preservation profitable with your membership, volunteerism, and donations. Appreciate what they have already done and how places are being repurposed to keep history alive
I love that the Bartow History Museum, located in the old 1869 County Courthouse, has the wood flooring from the Lindale Mill in Rome, GA.
So many of our historic textile mills that employed our people have caved in before they were salvaged. Yet, many have been preserved like Crown Mills in Dalton, Canton Mills in Cherokee Co, and Fulton Bag and Cotton in Atlanta have all become housing and retail.
How can we fill the room and make history come alive?
2. Make history immersive and memorable. We understand and participate in history when we feel it, touch it, see it, yes and even taste and smell it. Recently I took my four-year-old granddaughter Josie to a Planetarium. We experienced so much more than a star show.
They began playing a movie about how volcanoes formed the earth - the theater filled with sights and sounds of violent volcanoes, we almost felt the heat. Now Josie is a sensitive soul and I was worried she would have a meltdown. Fearing sensory overload, I was ready to leave and asked her if she was ready to go. “No Mimi, no.”
One part fear and the other part excitement - Josie just started talking - nonstop. She was performing a director’s cut— underscoring the action, commenting on the erupting volcanoes, and experiencing it all deeply. I know she will never forget it.
I challenge game designers and technical people to work with scholars and scribes to create an immersive history experience using all the senses. Collaborate to create an unforgettable sensory experience.
Imagine stopping at Coopers Furnace Day area at the remains of the lost town of Etowah. Scan a QR code or put on Augmented Reality goggles and meet the Cooper family in their hometown of Etowah. Then watch the workers pour iron pots and pans, and they see flouring mills grinding out meals. At the end of your virtual visit, Mark Anthony Cooper invites you into his home - Glen Holly, and offers a cup and you can almost taste the wine they made on site. It could happen here. The technology is here, we just need to harness it to help us understand the WHY of our past to ground us in the future.
3. Finally, fill the room by telling your story. Create multimedia records of your family stories - oral histories, YouTube interviews. Tell it, sing it, draw it, produce it or give your accounts to a good storyteller - so he or she could tell it for you. As a researcher, so much is missing that could answer so many questions if people had told their stories.
The Big Finish - The Conclusion
I am looking forward to that final dream. I want to go back to the attic, sling open the door, and find each artifact tagged with its proper story, a room full of narrative rooting us to the past. The most exciting thing to see will be finding that empty room full of history - stories about people, places, and things just sitting there ready for someone to breathe life into the emptiness and help us understand who we are and where we came from.
Would that work here? Would that work wherever you are? Start with you.
Maya Angelou said,
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
I say,
There is no greater tragedy than allowing your story to die with you.”
Thank you.