Historic Sites in Rabun County

The history of Rabun County

Rabun County was created on December 21, 1819, from land ceded by the Cherokee that year, and it was named for William Rabun, the self-educated governor of Georgia who was elected in 1817 and died in 1819. Cherokee people had lived in these mountains for at least a thousand years before the cession. The county seat was first called Claytonsville, for Judge Augustin Smith Clayton, and became Clayton in the 1820s. For much of the nineteenth century the county was remote, but the Tallulah Falls Railroad reached Tallulah Falls in 1882 and Clayton by 1904, bringing visitors to the hotels and boardinghouses that sprang up around Tallulah Gorge. In 1911 Helen Dortch Longstreet, widow of Confederate general James Longstreet, organized one of Georgia's earliest conservation campaigns to block a hydroelectric dam at the gorge, but the Georgia Railway and Power Company finished the Tallulah Falls dam in 1913. More dams followed, and Lake Burton, completed in 1919, flooded the old town of Burton. In the late 1960s teacher Eliot Wigginton launched the Foxfire program with students at Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, and writer and social critic Lillian Smith also made her home in the county. The 1971 filming of Deliverance brought new attention and tourists, and in 1992 the state and Georgia Power created Tallulah Gorge State Park.

Sources: georgiaencyclopedia.orggeorgiahistory.comrabunhistory.org