Atlanta, Ga.
Thurs., Jan. 21, 1926
Monday morning, warm and sunny, we could not resist seeing more of this beautiful countryside, so we drove back up the mountain to Asheville, and calling Mrs. Patch, our acquaintance from New Hampshire, rented a large, sunny room with bath and lots of hot water, in her comfortable suburban house. Mrs. Patch wanted us to be her guests but we insisted on a business arrangement. Her two stunning daughters and a really beautiful granddaughter live with her. Much interested in real estate, she lauds Asheville to the skies, expecting tremendous activity here next summer. Real estate companies, looking for the reaction from the Florida boom to come here, have bought most of the land in western Carolina, as they had around Chimney Rock.
On Tuesday, while Bill broke into several banks and real estate offices, I gleaned what was new and interesting from the industrial magazines in the library. In this way I have found some valuable bits of information for him.
Because the weather was so perfect for traveling, we left Asheville in the afternoon, driving down from the heights, through beautiful scenery till we came to a stunning wild spot near a place with the unlikely name of Tuccoa-on-the-Tugalo. The clear brook, supposedly the Tugalo, rippled over rocks, reminding us of northern streams, most every stream and river in the south that we have seen being muddy and sluggish.
Passing into South Carolina the next day, the roads, though not hard surfaced, were at first not as bad as we had expected. Further south, however, they worsened until, upon reaching Georgia, they became unspeakable. Pushing on in order to make Atlanta before the prophesied rain, we traveled through parts of three states and wound up at 10 o’clock at night in a mudhole called Alta, and I mean literally a mudhole. While, somehow, the two motorcycle wheels stood on terra firma, the sidecar wheel sunk completely out of sight, my elbows level with the mud, and Bill, a leaning tower above me, in imminent danger of teetering.
All were abed when Bill walked into the little town for help. However, he did find a huge beam and plank. After unloading everything from the machine, we began to dig, each step sucking off my shoes, the clay-mud being both heavy and sticky. We no longer wondered why the mule team we had noticed earlier could hardly pull a quarter load of this clay. Finally getting a path dug we put down the plank and while Bill pried with the beam, I pushed--and out she same. As it was then after midnight, the road ahead probably no better, and everything already off the motorcycle, we pitched the tent then and there, between the road and the railroad tracks, and fell asleep immediately.
Several times during the night a car got mired and we called advice from our store of experience, lending our shovel and planks. In the morning we were so anxious to decamp that we didn’t bother to look for water for coffee or to wash. But we seemed glued to the spot, bogging down again in less than a hundred yards. We learned later there was a perfectly good detour used by the well-informed, but no one had bothered to put up signs.
Soon after we began digging again the road boss summoned his gang, and with all hands pushing, we slowly emerged. A motorcycle with a sidecar has more trouble than a car on such roads, but only because the low-slung engine runs into the mud, but also because three wheels cannot get as good a grip on slippery clay. Before reaching Atlanta we dug ourselves out twice more.
All this red mud grows tiresome to look at as well as dig at. Cotton and corn fields must be terraced to prevent erosion, as rain easily washes away the clay. In a short time a disused roadbed becomes a gully, and together with many other deep red gashes, scars the countryside. The terraced effect of the fields, however, is picturesque.
Georgia is flat with apparently few rocks, so that, about fifteen miles from Atlanta, it was astonishing to see in the distance the tremendous rock, Stone Mountain, rising almost perpendicularly hundreds of feet. The rock itself being a natural monument, is most fitting for a great memorial. Three men held by ropes of steel shafts sunk in the rockface work with electric drills, but only Lee’s head has yet been cut. The work appears both perilous and costly and will take a long time to complete.