The Nacoochee Valley

The Nacoochee Valley opens up just south of Helen, where the Chattahoochee is still a small river and Mount Yonah fills the skyline. People have lived on this flat, fertile ground for well over a thousand years, and the valley has seen a mound-building village, Cherokee towns, a toll road, a gold rush and the forced removal that ended Cherokee life here. You can see most of it in an easy half day.

This page covers the history. For the visit itself, see our guides to Hardman Farm, Sautee Nacoochee and Nora Mill.

The dates below come from the New Georgia Encyclopedia, Georgia State Parks and the record of the Unicoi Turnpike. Early dates are approximate because they come from archaeology, not documents.

The grass-covered mound with a white gazebo on top is the valley's best-known landmark, and you can photograph it from the roadside where GA-17 and GA-75 meet. Archaeologists say people first used the site in the Early Middle Woodland period, around 100 to 500 CE. The platform mound itself belongs to the South Appalachian Mississippian people of the Lamar phase, who were here between about 1350 and 1600, according to Wikipedia's summary of the archaeology.

The New Georgia Encyclopedia calls the 1915 dig one of the earliest scientific excavations of its kind in Georgia. The crew, working for the Museum of the American Indian (Heye Foundation) and the Bureau of American Ethnology, found at least two mound stages and 75 burials. About a third of the burials held items that point to high social standing: hammered copper celts and ornaments, conch shell beads and cups, and elaborate pottery. Later burials held European glass beads and brass ornaments from the 1600s, which shows people kept using the site after European contact.

The mound has been altered since. Captain Nichols took about two feet off the top and built the gazebo in 1890, and the same encyclopedia entry notes that the original mound was excavated and that what you see today is a reconstruction. That doesn't change what the place meant. It still marks where a large village stood for generations.

A 1955 historical marker calls the site the ancient Cherokee town of Guaxule, visited by Hernando de Soto in 1540. Modern scholars dispute de Soto's route, so treat that marker as local tradition rather than settled history. Locals also tell a love story about two young people named Sautee and Nacoochee. It's a legend, and nothing in the archaeology supports it.

Long before any road had a name, animals and then people followed a path through these gaps. The Unicoi Turnpike ran about 150 miles, from the Tellico Blockhouse in Tennessee to near Toccoa, Georgia, and linked the Cherokee towns to the trading ports at Charleston and Savannah. Georgia State Parks says the Helen to Hardman Heritage Trail follows the turnpike, which began as a buffalo trail and Native trade route.

In 1813 the Cherokee agreed to let a toll road be built along the path. The terms were $160 a year for twenty years, after which the arrangement would be renegotiated or the road would return to Cherokee ownership. The payments were reportedly never made. The road made it easier for settlers, drovers and wagons to move through Cherokee land, which was the opposite of what Cherokee leaders had hoped to control.

This part of the story is hard, and it belongs here. Georgia extended its laws over Cherokee land between 1827 and 1831 and set up a lottery to hand the land to white Georgians, as the New Georgia Encyclopedia explains. The Treaty of New Echota (1835) was signed by Major Ridge, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot without the authorization of Principal Chief John Ross, and the Senate ratified it by a single vote.

In 1838 U.S. troops rounded up about 16,000 Cherokee into stockades and marched them west. Scholars estimate that 4,000 to 5,000 died on what the Cherokee call the trail where they cried. For more than 3,000 of those people, the Unicoi Turnpike was the first leg of the journey. The road you drive through the valley follows that same corridor.

To go deeper, the New Echota State Historic Site in Calhoun was the Cherokee capital from 1825 and is about two and a half hours from Helen. Our Cherokee history guide and Native American sites guide cover more.

The New Georgia Encyclopedia dates the gold discovery around Dukes Creek to 1828, and says nine gold mines eventually operated in White County and that mining continued there for more than a hundred years. The encyclopedia's gold rush entry points to an August 1, 1829 notice in the Georgia Journal as the earliest verified report. By spring 1830, Niles' Register said four thousand miners were working Yahoola Creek alone. The flood of prospectors onto Cherokee land is often called the Great Intrusion.

Early miners panned and shoveled the streambeds. Later, hard-rock and hydraulic mining took over, and Georgia State Parks says the land at Smithgall Woods State Park was reshaped by nineteenth-century hydraulic mining before it was reclaimed. Congress set up a branch of the U.S. Mint at Dahlonega in 1835, and the first coins, half eagles, were struck there on April 17, 1838, according to the encyclopedia's mint entry. It produced more than $6 million in gold coins before it closed in 1861. The Dahlonega Gold Museum, about 40 minutes from Helen, has the coins and the story.

Most of these stops are within a few minutes of each other. Check hours before you go, since state sites change their schedules in winter.