McLemore Cove

Entrance to our property from Sourwood Lane.

This is where we had our first mobile home.

(Click to enlarge)

 

Originally published in Georgia Backroads Magazine, this is the story of beautiful, remote McLemore Cove in the Northwest Georgia Mountains, and how we came to live here.

Part One of Four

The deer stood in the middle of the road as my wife slowly rounded a curve and came to a stop. They gazed at each other for a few moments, then the deer turned and calmly sauntered into the woods. Louise continued down the mountain into a remote valley, thinking to herself, "What wouldn't I give to live in a place like this!" 

It was the late 1970s and Louise was a nurse working for a home health agency based in Fort Oglethorpe.  The agency’s territory covered a large section of northwest Georgia, so she had patients in the village of Cloudland, far down Lookout Mountain. One of the other nurses told her about an alternate route to avoid the heavy morning fogs (actually clouds) that often made driving on top of the mountain hazardous. That alternate route led Louise down a graveled mountain road and into the remote valley named McLemore Cove.

A city girl who was born in Queens, New York, and who grew up in Miami, Louise had for years longed to live in the country. I, on the other hand, grew up in the country and had no burning desire to return, but -- I love my wife, so what can you do?

 Andrews Lane in the heart of McLemore Cove

Olympus E-PL1, 14-42mm f3.5-5.6 Zuiko lens

 

We began to look for country property, both in Georgia and Tennessee, not really expecting that we might find something in McLemore Cove. But in 1985, a newspaper ad led us to 30 acres on a ridge with frontage on Chickamauga Creek, and on the day before Christmas, 1987, 155 years after the Cherokee Land Lottery of 1832 opened the area to legal settlement, we also became settlers in the Cove; not in a log cabin, but in a 12x40-foot mobile home.

The old Hicks farmhouse on our property.

Now, only the chimney remains.

 

The Cherokee, of course, were here long before the first white settlers, and the Cove was named after one of them, Captain John McLemore, the son of a Scottish fur trader and a Cherokee mother. A veteran of the War of 1812, he perhaps saw the handwriting on the wall and moved to Arkansas in 1817, where he became a leader among the western band of his tribe. The rest of the Cherokee were forcefully removed in the late 1830s in the infamous "Trail of Tears," one of the most shameful episodes in American history. 

A "cove," by the way, is Southern Appalachian-speak for a valley enclosed by mountains. In the west they might call it a box canyon. The best-known cove, probably, is Cades Cove in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. McLemore Cove is neither as large nor as well-known, but it doesn't give much away in terms of history or beauty, and as for being less famous, the residents of this particular cove would probably count that a blessing.

To be continued. 

Blog Note: I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings at alifeinphotography.blogspot.com. I'm trying to build up my readership, so if you're reading this on Facebook and like what I write, would you please consider sharing my posts?

(Photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone