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.
Read moreHightower (Etowah) Trail and other Native American trails of the Atlanta area
1940’s map still indicates a section of the Hightower Trail.
Michael Hitt pointed out that the history of indigenous people goes much further back, before the Creek and Cherokee were in this area. A Georgia Department of Natural Resources chart shows the Archaic period as 8000 BC to 1000 BC. During this time, people would have used natural shelters, such as the the rock overhangs along the paths of the Island Ford Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area in Sandy Springs.
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