Tarkiln Cove

Sheldon and I made another expedition in mid December, looking for old homesites. Starting up on the Gumlog Mtn ridgeline, we worked our way down Tarkiln Cove, through several other coves/drainages, and eventually down to East Gumlog Crk. We spent a lot of time crawling through rhododendron and laurel thickets / hells, and over and under deadfall and blowdowns. We found several homesites and an old mica mine / prospect. There was another partial chimney that we were hoping to find, that Sheldon first saw while grouse hunting twenty years ago, but we never did locate it. With a clear blue sky, the contrasty sunlight and shadows in the woods were horrible for photography, but I did what I could in post-processing to make them a little more viewable.

The first site we came to (UN53) consisted of several rock piers that once supported a log cabin on a slope alongside a creek.

There was a rock pier at each corner, as well as one in the middle of the two long sides. Eyeing across the stack tops, one could see that they were all level with each other.

I couldn't get all the rock piers in one image, and the middle ones were partially collapsed.

One of the rock stacks / piers.

When Sheldon came across this site 20+ years ago, the remains of some of the logs from the cabin were still there, but they are all rotted away now.

The taller piers are on the lower side of the slope, while shorter piers (see toppled rocks left of center) are on the uphill side.

An old wash basin with the bottom gone was nearby.

We came across a big beech tree with a number of carvings, mostly initials. You could tell they were old by how much they had "stretched" as the tree grew. We weren't sure what the design was, about 12" tall, but Sheldon decided it might be a stylized woman's body, with the curvy hourglass shape, breasts, belly button, pubes. Greatly stretched out horizontally after who knows how many years.

Continuing on, the only evidence of another homesite was a collapsed chimney.

UN54 - Scattered chimney rocks. The lighting was terrible here.

Climbing through a laurel hell to get up and over the next ridge, we were in the cove where Sheldon thought a nice chimney was located. We looked all around but only found rockpiles and a couple of stone lined terraces.

It was a beautiful, fairly level site for a homeplace; with all the rockpiles, it had no doubt been farmed years ago.

You can see more rockpiles in the background of these images.

More rockpiles...

Such a nice flat open area, but we never did find the chimney.

Climbing over the next ridge, we came across an old mine prospect.

View up the mine trench cut. There were numerous mica mines in our area, but few of the smaller prospects were recorded in the old geologic reports.

Scattered mica flakes around the rim of the diggings.

Nearing the end of our trek, we came across one last homesite. This site had a collapsed chimney (seen here), a dugout root cellar with more rocks, a rock terrace, and some walnut trees.

UN55 - Section of the collapsed chimney

Part of the collapsed chimney adjacent to the root cellar.

Gumlog Index	N Towns-Union Index
Towns-Union-White Co. Index	NE GA - NC Index