Included with GeorgiaRoam+Toccoa Falls College Campus Tour
A Bible college built around a 186-foot waterfall and the memory of a flood.
Self-guided walking tour in Toccoa Falls · 0.6 mi · walking · ~1h · 5 stops
The Tour
Few campuses in America have a 186-foot waterfall at their heart. Toccoa Falls College, a Christian and Missionary Alliance school on 1,100 acres bordering the Chattahoochee National Forest, grew up around Toccoa Falls, one of the tallest free-falling waterfalls east of the Mississippi. This walk carries you from the falls trailhead up to the historic campus, and past the memorials to the 1977 Kelly Barnes Dam flood, which killed 39 people and reshaped the college forever.
Toccoa Falls College Campus Tour is a self-guided walking tour of Toccoa Falls, built around its campus side.
The walk covers 5 stops over about 0.6 miles and roughly 1 hour, entirely at your own pace. Each stop's story unlocks on your phone the moment you arrive — GPS-triggered, hands-free, no guide and no tour group to keep up with.
What you'll see
Most visitors arrive at Gate Cottage, the building at the entrance to the falls. Students built its stone section from local rock around 1940. It was one of the few lower-campus buildings to survive the 1977 flood, and it was rebuilt after a fire in 2009. A short, level gravel path leads through the woods to Toccoa Falls. The water drops 186 feet off a sheer rock face into a boulder-strewn pool, a single free fall taller than Niagara.
Near the base of the trail stands the memorial to the 39 people who died on the night the Kelly Barnes Dam broke. It's a quiet place where you'll learn what happened in the minutes after the water came over the falls, and how the college chose to stay. Up on the historic upper campus stand an administration building whose concrete blocks students poured by hand in the early 1920s and a memorial chapel named for a couple who served the school for three decades and died together in the flood.
The route covers about 0.6 miles on foot and takes around an hour, with one uphill stretch. The falls are open to the public daily, with shorter hours on weekends. The flow is strongest after rain and in spring, while fall color arrives in late October. The Georgia Roam app plays each stop's story as you walk.
Georgia
