McLemore Cove: Part 2

 Lookout Mountain from West Cove Road

Pentax 6x7, 105mm f2.4 Takumar lens, Fujichrome 100 film

(Click to enlarge)

This is the second installment of my article about McLemore Cove, originally published in Georgia Backroads Magazine. The first part was posted on my blog on Monday, December 28th. 

The mountains that enclose and form the Cove are Lookout, famous for "See Rock City," and Pigeon, its offshoot to the east, famous among spelunkers for some of the world's deepest caves.

If you were to view Lookout Mountain from above, you would see that it looks like an alligator with its jaws open. With the tip of its nose in Tennessee, its body sprawls southwest for 80 miles across the northwest corner of Georgia and into Alabama. The lower jaw is Pigeon Mountain, and in the alligator's mouth lies McLemore's Cove. At the south end, the "head" of the Cove, where the two mountains come together, Dougherty Gap Road winds to the top by way of four hairpin curves. It's paved now, but that was where Louise saw the deer. 

When we first came to the Cove, it was under siege from the Georgia Power Company, which wanted to dam Chickamauga Creek and bury the beauty and history of the Cove under a lake. Through the efforts of residents who banded together in the McLemore's Cove Preservation Society to fight that attempt, it has indeed been preserved.  And having been designated a National Historic District in 1994, the Cove will continue to be a treasure for years to come.

The Historic District includes all the land south of Ga. Highway 136 and between the two mountains -- some 50,141 acres, with a large number of historic buildings and sites and historic farm complexes. In practice, however, the limits aren't all that strict. In 1872, the founders of Cove Methodist Church, two miles north of 136, obviously considered themselves to be in the Cove when they named their church. 

Cove Methodist Church. Technically, not in the Cove.

But close enough. And very beautiful.

Canon EOS 6D

In September 1863, McLemore's Cove was the scene of a missed opportunity that could have changed the course of the Civil War.

Union General William Rosecrans had maneuvered his forces around Chattanooga in such a way that Confederate General Braxton Bragg had to abandon the city or risk having his supply line to Atlanta cut. Rosecrans's army was divided into three columns, with one column under General George Thomas coming into the Cove from the west, headed for LaFayette.  On September 9, Bragg devised a plan to trap Thomas's forces. He sent Generals Thomas Hindman and D.H. Hill on a forced march to bottle up the Union army in the Cove; once on the scene, however, the Confederate generals dithered instead of engaging the Yankees. Then they retreated, the Union troops doing the same. A few shots were fired, but what could have been a battle that would likely have changed the outcome of the Battle of Chickamauga a week later went down in history as only a minor skirmish. 

To be continued.

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(Photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone