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December 19, 2009

Mill hoping for more fairs

By Mark Millican

VARNELL — The Prater’s Mill area in the 1930s and 1940s was a “living community” where people took care of one another — especially at Christmastime — remembers Jean Kettles Murray.

“We used to pack fruit baskets from the fruit company in Dalton, and give them to all the tenant farmers, the people who worked at the mill and the man who ran the store,” she said on Friday from Griffin, where her sister, Elaine, was visiting. “We’d put a toy in the basket for the children.”

Murray said oranges, apples, tangerines and nuts were some of the staples of the seasonal offering.

“Back then, it was food and stuff like that you shared at Christmas,” she said. “We were just sharing the bounty of the food.”

Murray’s father, former mayor Gordon Kettles, and her grandfather, alderman Van Kettles, at one time owned The Dalton News but she recalled it shutting down during the Depression. The family lived in town so the kids could go to school, but in the summertime went to live in the country.

“It was a living community,” she said. “We didn’t have electric lights and used kerosene lamps, and people looked after one another.”

Murray said the mill ran year-round and the miller lived on the property. She also remembered the cotton gins cranking up in Dalton when the crop came in.

Prater’s Mill Foundation director Judy Alderman has also been shepherding the annual country fair at the site since its inception in 1971. As she pointed out sunken areas in the earth where local historians say the remains of Cherokee Indians and early black settlers lay, she remarked that the grounds are “kind of a spiritual place.”

“I call it a graveyard, not a cemetery, because a cemetery is orderly, and this is not,” she said of the site bearing wooden tacked-together crosses several hundred yards away from the mill. In the background, the noise of heavy equipment rumbled where Whitfield County’s newest high school is being built.

“There’s another graveyard where pre-Cherokee people are buried,” she said, not mentioning the whereabouts for fear unscrupulous collectors might ravage it.

Alderman conducted a “damage tour” of the property after recent heavy rains, picking up trash thrown off the Ga. Highway 2 bridge over Coahulla Creek along the way.

“I’ve been told people dump their trash off the bridge upstream when the transfer station is closed,” she said, surveying the flotsam of bottles, balls and other debris trapped above the dam by large downed limbs. The dull roar of muddy water cascading over the dam provided background music.

“Garrison Keillor said you never master a river,” she said, referring to the popular radio show host. “We approach this river with great humility and respect. This is kind of a spiritual place. Otherwise, why would three cultures choose to bury their dead here?”

She was referring to the former American Indian inhabitants, and black settlers and white settlers in the area.

Under the mill itself, huge squared stones stacked one upon another form the foundation.

“I asked Earl Shugart (a nearby resident) how the men moved some of these rocks,” Alderman relayed. “He said, ‘They had better men.’”

Whether the mill continues building on its foundations of memories remains to be seen. County officials said a decision on the lease should come in January, but commissioner Harold Brooker said in October during the most recent festival, “ I don’t think this will be the last fair.”

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