TRAVELER'S REST AND THE TUGALOO CROSSROADS

On Georgia Highway 123, amid the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains,stands Travelers Rest Historic Site. The house stands within two miles of thesite of Old Tugaloo Town, an important Cherokee village. It is situated on acrossroads at the southern end of the Great Wagon Road, down which a wave ofEuropean-American migration poured to fill the land east of the Appalachians inthe mid-eighteenth century. Its history encompasses the Cherokees, migration,frontier war, and gold rush; it includes the development of Travelers Rest asstagecoach inn/tavern into its long years as a plantation center; through CivilWar and Reconstruction, the gradual decline of land and family is taken to thepresent century, where Travelers Rest becomes the physical embodiment ofhistory transfigured into legend. The history of Travelers Rest is the history of a people and a heritage, reflected in the structure that developed with the years.