NoGa Camp Out - 2009
April 16-19, 2009
Factoids from Scott, KD4MSR
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- The Jocassee Valley was named for Jocassee Town, a Cherokee Indian
"under hill" or "lower hill" town located near the confluence of the
Whitewater and Toxaway rivers. The over hill or upper hill towns are over what's now
the SC/NC border, that is, across the Blue Ridge escarpment.
- I know of no definitive translation for Jocassee. A really,
really, sketchy legend terms it "the place of the lost one." Just as
Oconee is translated as land beside the water, White water, watery eyes of the hills,
etc., ad infinitum, ad naseum, blah, blah.
- It was an area filled with the Carolina Parakeet, now extinct, a
green parakeet. There still is a stuffed one or two at the Georgia State Capitol
Building. At Shepherd Center we have a Audubon print of them that is striking--it's
about four feet high by three feet wide.
- The local Cherokee bands were the Brown Vipers (maybe these are
copperheads?) and the Green Birds (Eastatoes--the Carolina Parakeets).
- Duke Power Company, using the name Crescent Land Resources, bought
the Jocassee Valley and many thousands of acres around it in the 1960s.
- Lake Jocassee was finished and the lake filled by 1973.
- Devil's Fork State Park was finished in 1991--a full 18 years
later---and then given to the State of South Carolina.
- Many thousands of acres are set aside as permanent wilderness area.
Many South Carolinians who used to call Jocassee "South Carolina's little
Switzerland" now call the northwestern corner of their state the golden corner, the
golden crescent, or the golden triangle.
- Devil's Fork State Park was named for the three-pronged creek (trident)
that used to flow into the Whitewater River--the main river of the Jocassee Valley and one
of the three rivers that form Lake Jocassee: Thompson, Whitewater, and Toxaway
Rivers.
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