Cooper's Furnace and the Etowah Indian Mounds

This morning after breakfast, we wanted to go check out the Allatoona Dam. We've lived so close for quite a few years, but we've never actually seen it. The dam is placed at the western end of... no surprise here... Lake Allatoona and re-releases the flow of water to the Etowah River. It is a relatively impressive structure, but we didn't snap any pictures. Like power plants and such, I'm not sure if taking pictures of corps and utility structures is smiled upon or not, but we didn't, just in case. Only two of about ten sluices were flowing and the river was at it's low, recreational level. When the dam is generating, it turns into a fast flowing beast for a few hours! At the same spot where the dam is, there is an old, stone civil war furnace known as Cooper's Furnace.

After visting this bit of old Bartow County history, we decided to step back a little further and visit one of my favorite places - the Indian mounds on the Etowah River. Although the weather was ideal, we were the only ones there and had the places to ourselves.

I refer to the trail down the middle as the straightaway because it causes Jack and Zane to spring off without warning. Out there, why stop them? I imagine that a few hundred years ago, little native kids were doing the same thing.

It's hard to get scale from a set of photos, but this gives a pretty good impression of the largest of the mounds (chief's mound).

She'll be aghast that I shared a picture of her here, but I thought Jeannie looked particularly lovely in this one!

It's not easy to see, but an ancient fish weir is visible in the pic below - it's a v-shaped formation of rocks stacked from the floor of the river to the surface and funnels fish into the end to make them easier to catch. A fisherman could stand on the sandbar at the tip of the V and either spear or net them as they swam or were herded toward him.

And when the little guy runs out of gas...