Gainesville was a land of promise on first 4th of July

GAINESVILLE - On this day 236 years ago, July 4th, 1776, Gainesville and Hall County, in fact all of Northeast Georgia, was a blank canvas, an unwritten page and a land of promise.

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, delegates from 13 former British colonies had penned a document that stated they were independent of British rule, but in what was to become Gainesville there was no one to celebrate that fateful first Independence Day, according to Glen Kyle, Managing Director of the Northeast Georgia History Center at Brenau University.

"We've seen the Chattahoochee National Forest, but it didn't look like that back then," Kyle said.  "You have to think of trees 10 to 12 feet in diameter, they were huge, it was a primeval forest, it never had a tree cut down, it had never had clear cutting done. The soil was rich and untouched. This was an amazing place."

Kyle said perhaps the best reference on unsettled Gainesville and Hall County is the naturalist William Bartram, who journeyed through the wilderness South in the late 1770s and wrote "Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia." In April 1776, he left Charleston, South Carolina to explore the Cherokee Nation.

On July 4th, 1776, Gainesville/Hall was part of the Cherokee Nation with very few white settlers.

"What ties it to the Fourth of July is potential," Kyle added.  "That's what the whole dream of independence was; it was self-determination not only for individuals but for the entire nation. That nation wanted to spread westward, it wanted to build new country and the way it was going to do that was to take these potential places and make them into places where people could work, live and prosper."

On July 4th, 1776, there was no bustling intersection with high-rise buildings at the corner of Jesse Jewell and E.E. Butler Parkways. Gainesville was on the edge of Georgia's western frontier where people along the coast and from the Carolinas would migrate, claim the land, and tame it.

"It was the screaming, wild frontier," Kyle said. "When the Declaration was signed, 90 percent of the people on the North American continent lived within 20 miles of the coast, but this is where they wanted to go, this is where they saw that nation going."

Kyle points to the Declaration as a rebellion against Mother England's control of the land and settlement. England's Proclamation of 1763 declared that expansion of the colonies would go no further than the peak of the Appalachian Mountains. Colonists saw that as a gross violation of human freedom to expand and prosper. That was one of the big seeds of the Revolution, they wanted to get to the West.

The area would have another eventual link to Independence Day, when Hall County was created on December 15th, 1818 by the General Assembly as the state's 45th county, named for Dr. Lyman Hall, one of Georgia's three signers of the Declaration.

"Independence was still in living memory at that time, so Independence Day was definitely going to be celebrated," Kyle said.  It was recognized as one, if not the, most important holiday of the year."

On November 30, 1821 the frontier village of Mule Camp Springs was named for General Edmond P. Gaines, War of 1812 hero, surveyor, road builder and Indian fighter. Gainesville was also designated by the state legislature as Hall County's county seat.

"He was a very interesting fellow," Kyle said.  He fought in the Second Seminole War and was even involved in the Texas War for Independence...he was everywhere."

The original spring that gave birth to Mule Camp Springs trading post still exists as a place of shade and water in the heart of Gainesville across from the intersection of West Academy Street and Jesse Jewell Parkway. The Mule Camp was near the intersection of two Indian trails that settlers followed around 1800. It was the second village established by white settlers in Northeast Georgia, the first being Limestone Springs. Those settlers were mostly of German and Scotch-Irish stock and were a fiercely independent group who started small farms where they raised wheat and corn.

"Some people were trying to get away from debt, some people were trying to get free land which was no longer available close to the coast and certainly not in Europe," according to Kyle. "Some people just wanted a chance to live free. The land, all you could use, all you would need was simply there for the going and getting."

Kyle added that prevailing mindset challenged Native Americans who were already on the land and considered it their home.

"When it first began there were small scale conflicts," Kyle said. "The Indians did not mind one or two white families moving in but when they realized those one or two families were [a] precursor to a wave of settlement, they began to get defensive and fight."

In the end, Kyle asserts, there was no way to stop that wave of settlement.

"All historians agree, whatever the morality, whatever the cause, there simply was no way to stop it, it was such a part of independence, it was such a part of what America was formed on and of what those who came here were looking for. It was inevitable, it was unstoppable."

A blank canvas, an unwritten page...Kyle said that is as good a metaphor as any for Gainesville, Georgia on July 4th, 1776.

"That's exactly what it was," he said. "A blank canvas, an unwritten page and it was the founding generation and their sons and grandsons who wrote on that page and set the foundation for what it was to become, the central city and the central county in Northeast Georgia."