CORNELIA

Lore

Cornelia abounds in historical lore. Near the city is the Wofford Trail, on which many stagecoach robberies occurred. The last railroad holdup in Georgia took place at Cagle's Crossing, which is a few miles south of Cornelia. The whole of Habersham County was extremely loyal to the Confederacy and was known, along with the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and countless other fertile, out-of-the-way places as the "breadbasket of the Confederacy", as thousands of bushels of wheat and corn were supplied to the troops from this area alone. After the Fall of Atlanta, a detachment of William Tecumseh Sherman's cavalry was sent to raid the county; but the Confederate Home Guard, made up of men too old for military duty, left the mountains on which Cornelia is situated and met the Union soldiers at a narrow pass about four miles east of the town. By making considerable noise and stirring up clouds of smoke, they scared off the Union soldiers and saved the area from complete devastation. Today this skirmish is remembered as "The Battle of the Narrows".

German and Swiss immigrants used their wine-making skills to create an industry in the 1880s that flourished until a prohibition law stopped it. Cotton, timber and lumber products, and the apple and peach industries were also important to the success of the area. Riegel Textile built one of the region's first major industrial facilities in 1966 with what was then an ultra-modern, cutting edge textile mill designed by Bill Pittendreigh in the neighboring community of Alto. As with any city, there were a number of businesses, but hotels contributed greatly to the growth and development of the city in its early history.