Carl T. Hudgins completed a report on the history of Native American trails in DeKalb County on January 22, 1951 which is among the archives at DeKalb History Center in Decatur, Georgia. He begins his paper by explaining the problems of telling the history, calling it “fragmentary, obtainable a little here and a little there.” The written history of the trails came from people who lived long after the Native Americans were forcibly removed and long after the first white settlers had died.

This blog will focus on the Hightower Trail, but I give a brief summary of other trails in another post, found here.

Hudgins describes the Hightower or Etowah trail as coming down from the Etowah River in the mountains and crossing the Chattahoochee River at the Shallowford trail south of Roswell. A road just south of the Chattahoochee River called Hightower Trail still exists today. Hudgins describes “A section of the old trail, leading back towards the Atlanta and Roswell highway, runs diagonally across the highway two miles south of Roswell.”

“From the Fulton County line near Roswell the trail runs an irregular and crooked course in a generally southeastern direction towards Stone Mountain,” continues Hudgins. An act of the General Assembly of 1822 designated the trail as a boundary line between DeKalb and Gwinnett counties. The same border remains today.

I recently discovered from a reader of this blog that there are also roads near Stone Mountain which still carry the name Hightower Trail. The trail serves as a border between DeKalb and Gwinnett in this area.

Carl Hudgins references history recorded by Eugene Mitchell, co-founder of the Atlanta Historical Society. Mitchell says, “An extensive trade long existed between the Indians and the licensed traders at Charleston and Augusta, who carried their goods on pack mules, by the Hightower and Stone Mountain (or Echota) trail to the Indian town just above Bolton on the Chattahoochee River known as standing Peachtree, and so called from a large and ancient Indian peach tree that grew on top of an Indian mound where the pumping station of the Atlanta waterworks is now located. The first historical mention of it that I have found is in the records of the Executive Council of Georgia, August 1, 1782, during the Revolutionary War, when a commission was sent to Standing Peachtree to treat with the Indians.”

Hudgins states in his 1951 report that he doesn’t know of any DeKalb County historian who have attempted to specifically identify the specific location of the trails. However, in 1995 Dunwoody historian Jim Perkins put together a map of the portion of the Hightower Trail that passes thgough Dunwoody. His research included studying old maps that still showed the Hightower Trail and attempting to retrace the path of the trail on foot, including walking through homeowner’s yards and knocking on their doors.  

Carl T. Hudgins was a native of Decatur, Georgia who graduated from Atlanta Law School. He practiced law from 1915 until 1978. He also served in the Georgia House of Representatives several times. He was a founder and the first president of the DeKalb Historical Society and was also a member of the Pythagoras Masonic Lodge Number 41 for over 50 years. He died in 1983 at the age of 92 according to the Atlanta Constitution.