Swingalong Bridge at Rock City Gardens spans a deep crevasse.Traci asked, "What is Rock City?" To answer her question, here's an excerpt from my book Rock City Barns: A Passing Era.
"Probably the third-most-asked question by travelers south in the 1950s and '60s (after "are we almost there yet?" and "When do we eat?") was "What the heck is a rock city?" Tempted beyong endurance by the pervasive message of the ubiquitous signs, millions made the pilgrimage up Lookout Mountain to see for themselves what it was all about.
What they found was a ten-acre tract of massive stone formations (hence the name "Rock City") on the eastern cliffs of the mountain overlooking Chattanooga, Tennessee and the North Georgia countryside. Laid out with flower-bordered trails winding through deep crevasses and along cliff tops, Rock City Gardens is an oddly pleasing blend of magnificent natural beauty and a charming naïveté. The naïveté comes in the form of trailside elfin figurines, walking "storybook" characters (Mother Goose, Humpty-Dumpty, Rocky the Rock City elf) and Fairyland Caverns, a man-made cave featuring black-lighted dioramas of nursery rhyme scenes. This is what family entertainment was like before Disney World and video games, and the place still holds a special fascination for kids of all ages.
Although the rock formations have been there for a long, long time, Rock City as a tourist attraction is the brainchild of a freewheeling, cigar-smoking entrepreneur named Garnet Carter and his wife Frieda, a lover of beauty and folklore. During the 1920s, while Garnet was developing a fashionable 100-acre subdivision called Fairyland on Lookout Moutain and inventing the game of miniature golf (which he franchised nationally under the name "Tom Thumb Golf"), Frieda was making Rock City, which was a part of Fairyland, into her own personal nature garden. She laid out trails and planted their borders with hundreds of wildflowers and shrubs indigenous to the southern mountains. For her efforts she was awarded the Bronze Medal of Distinction by the Garden Club of America in 1931, the first Southerner to be so honored.
In the meantime, the Carter fortunes had changed. The stock market crash of 1929 put an end to the building boom of the '20s. And while Tom Thumb Golf was doing very well, Carter foresaw the end of the miniature golf craze and managed to unload it in 1930 at a handsome figure. Unfortunately, he invested the proceeds in U.S. Steel stock at $298 a share, which promptly dropped to $30.
Finding himself not exactly broke, but feeling some pain, Carter turned his full attention to his wife's little garden. Motivated both by economic possibilities and by love for his wife, who was then in the beginning stages of a debilitating disease, he began to expand upon the improvements she had begun. The trails were widened and paved with flagstones and suspension bridges were built over chasms. Statues of gnomes and storybook characters, which had adorned fhr Fairyland neighborhood and the original Tom Thumb golf course at the Fairyland Inn (now the Fairyland Club) were moved to Rock City. On May 21, 1932, the park was opened to the public.
Unfortunately, the country was in the depths of depression and the tourism industry was still in its infancy. In spite of intense promotion, only eighteen hundred people came that first year, and things did not improve substantially until 1935, 36, or 37, depending on whose memory you trust. Clark Byers says 1937 -- or maybe 1936 -- was the year he began painting "See Rock City" on barns around the Southeast, and things began to look up for the attraction.
"I couldn't figure out how in the world Garnet Carter could afford to pay me $40 a sign," says Byers. "But boy, I went up to Rock City one day and the parking lots was full and people parked all around, and the signs had brought them in there. And I realized really, how smart he was, y'know."
Whether one can actually see seven states from the sheer cliffs of Lover's Leap will continue to be debated, but Rock City is a place that's easy to like"If you like my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/ Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.
The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia will be released in June, 2023.
Photograph and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.
I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.
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