Georgia Natural Wonder #19 - Toccoa Falls. 907

[Top Row Dawg]

Georgia Natural Wonder #19 - Toccoa Falls

Toccoa Falls is a waterfall with a vertical drop of 186 feet, on the campus of Toccoa Falls College in Stephens County, Georgia.



Toccoa was the Cherokee word for "beautiful" and Toccoa Falls has long been one of the prettiest waterfalls of North Georgia.


1842 Etching.

Some claim that Toccoa Falls is the tallest free-falling waterfall in the Eastern United States, though at least four others are taller:

• Crabtree Falls in Virginia, cascading 1,000 feet, including one drop of 400 feet.
• Caledonia Cascade in Georgia includes a 262-foot drop.
• Fall Creek Falls in Tennessee, 256 feet.
• Taughannock Falls in New York, 215 feet.


1870 photo.

Toccoa Falls is ONE of the tallest free-falling waterfalls east of the Mississippi River. It is higher than Niagara Falls. The falls are a popular tourist attraction and campus retreat. The short 100-yard path to the falls is handicap accessible.


1875 image.

Toccoa Falls is accessed through the gift shop which is open from 8:30 a.m. until sundown. A nominal admission fee is collected in the gift shop.

Ticket Prices:Children 6 and under: FreeAdults: $2Seniors: $1Family of 4 or more: $6

The Gate Cottage Gift Shop offers souvenirs of Toccoa Falls, furniture made in the Toccoa area, crafts from local craftsmen, and other gift items including Village Candles and any other great companies.


1929 image.

Damn it, I can’t help but tangent to this waterfall I never heard of, and it turns out to be a rainwater runoff to Tallulah Gorge. Caledonia Cascade, sometimes called Cascade Falls, is a 600-foot waterfall located in Rabun County, Georgia, USA near the town of Tallulah Falls. This waterfall occurs on a small stream that drops into the Tallulah Gorge near the beginning of the gorge. This tiered waterfall features three drops, the longest of which is 262 feet. It is best viewed from the hiking trail around the rim of the Tallulah Gorge. After Amicalola Falls, Cascade Falls is the second tallest waterfall in Georgia (tied with Cochrans Falls). Now that fall is familiar because it kicked my ass twice this summer.


Caledonia Cascade.

A sad tradition is connected with the Falls of Toccoa. A white woman, a prisoner of the Indians, it is said, was compelled by them to betray a party of the whites, who were encamped in the neighborhood. Under pretense of leading them by a secret path to a safer position, she led her unsuspecting victims, blindfold, one by one, to the brow of the precipice and suffered them to walk off the brink.


Damn it looks a lot higher from the top. Never been up there.

Another tradition relates how a fair, innocent boy, a child of the white race, was dashed down the precipice by an Indian, a sacrifice to the demon of revenge in his savage bosom. Probably there is little truth in either tale. It is natural for men to love the embellishment of beautiful scenes with imaginative legends.


Legends still being created today.

It seems that a lot of our Natural Wonders of Georgia have a deadly appeal in this list. I think of all the people who have fallen off Stone Mountain and Mt. Yonah. I think of the deaths in the Pigeon Mountain caves or the just discussed drownings on the Chattooga River. Well the main reason I include this site so high on my state wide list is probably due to its role in one of the greatest Natural disasters in my lifetime. During the early morning hours of November 6, 1977, after five days of almost continual rain, the dam that impounded the waters of Kelly Barnes Lake (located above the Toccoa Falls College campus) burst, and 176 million gallons of water surged through the campus below in the space of a few minutes. Most of the college personnel who lived in the path of the flood were asleep at the time, and 39 of them were swept to their deaths in the raging waters of Toccoa Creek. The dam was not rebuilt.



Toccoa, Ga. — The earthen dam above beautiful Toccoa Falls had been taken for granted for most of its 40 years. Through other winter and spring rains that come annually to the North Georgia mountains, the tree covered dam had held. About 1:30 a.m. Sunday, after days of torrential rains, the dam started to leak. Groaning under the pressure of 129 million gallons of water, the leak became a breach, and the dam washed away, sending a 30-foot wall of water roaring through the trailer park and Bible college in the peaceful valley below. In a few horrifying minutes, at least 39 men, women, and children died in the onslaught of rushing water, wreckage and mud.



Sometime after midnight, Eldon Elsberry, Ron Ginther, Bill Ehrensberger, and David Fledderjohann, started knocking on the doors of trailers to warn residents of the rising waters. Only Elsberry and Ginther would survive the night.With a crashing sound like a thunderstorm, a wedge-shaped wall of water some 30 feet high poured down the creek and shot over Toccoa Falls, tumbling huge boulders and tree trunks before it.



The footbridge at the base of the falls vanished, as did the road that leads down the shoulder of the campus and across the creek to some recreational buildings. Just past the road, the creek makes a sharp left turn. On the outside of the bend sits Forrest Hall, with the windows of its basement rooms facing the stream. It was in that basement that three young men died. . . . Sweeping past Forrest Hall, the water churned through several houses, moved slightly to the right, or south, and washed headlong into an area once known as Trailerville.



A short distance away it was the highway bridge, straddling the creek just below the city’s hospital that contained the flood and kept it from wreaking havoc the length of the creek, Corps of Engineers workers said. Debris piled up against the bridge created a small dam, slowing the onrushing tide.



I find this excerpt from the New York Post………

The dam burst sent tons of water over the 186-foot-hight Toccoa Falls into the lower campus of Toccoa Falls Bible College, where some 250 persons slept in dormitories, houses and mobile homes below the falls.



Kenny Carroll of Washington, one of the few to escape from the basement of a men's dormitory, said: "The Lord woke me up an instant before the water came in." He went on to explain "I reached over from my bed and was trying to shut the door, but the water forced the door open. When I got out of bed, the water was already a foot high. We ran up the stairs and by the time we got there the whole basement was filled up. It just happened in five or six seconds."


Forrest Hall still stands on college grounds.

Bill Stacey, 19, who lived with his parents in a trailer, said: "I heard a bunch of people screaming and hollering. There was this terrible screeching noise… the trailers were all over the place - some floating, some just torn apart."



Bodies were found as far as two miles from the dam, which held back the 80-acre Kelly Barnes Lake. Waterlogged mattresses, battered window frames and scores of uprooted trees littered the banks of Toccoa Creek.



Dave Hinkle, a student from Syracuse, N.Y., said a wave 30 feet high and 40 feet wide tore through the second-story windows of a men's dormitory. The building was extensively damaged. Nine permanent faculty houses were destroyed.



Three members of the school's fire patrol tried to give some warning of the flood. Two died in the effort. Eldon Elseberry, the surviving patrol member, said "I looked up and I saw red water that was really starting to move down Toccoa Creek. We ran and got into a jeep. We were going to turn the sirens on and wake the people up. We didn't even get to the bridge." The jeep was swamped, pitching Elseberry and his companions into the swirling water. Elseberry said he was swept 125 feet downstream. "I grabbed a little tree. I saw the bank. I said, 'This is my chance,' and I made it for the bank." He found a more substantial tree and scrambled up onto the bank to safety.



The National Weather Service said poor communications in the area prevented an accurate record of rainfall. But a spokesman said one station north of Toccoa reported 5.25 inches of rain in the 24 hours that ended at 7 a.m. yesterday. Water and natural gas supplies to the community were cut off and electric power curtailed. A state of emergency was declared. Officials said that the flood jammed houses, mobile homes and cars against the bridge over the creek. If the debris had not piled up there, slowing the wave of water, the damage and death toll might have been much greater, they said.



We add this back story on the Kelly Barnes Dam. It was an earthen embankment dam once located in Stephens County, Georgia, just outside the city of Toccoa. It collapsed on November 6, 1977 after heavy rainfall, and the resulting flood killed 39 people and caused $2.8 million in damage. The dam was never rebuilt, and the Toccoa Falls downstream of the dam site is now a memorial and tourist attraction on the campus of Toccoa Falls College.



In 1899, the original rock crib dam was built by E. P. Simpson to create a reservoir for a small hydroelectric power plant that began operating that same year. The plant, now a historical site on the Toccoa Falls College campus called the Old Toccoa Falls Power Plant, produced 200 KW for the town of Toccoa, Georgia. The power plant was transferred in 1933 to the Toccoa Falls Institute, which decided to develop a more stable electric power source and built an earthen embankment dam over the original rock crib dam between 1939 and 1940. After World War II, the dam was again raised, creating Barnes Lake, a 40-acre reservoir. The modifications provided power for Toccoa Falls Institute until 1957, when the power production was stopped, and the lake was thereafter used only for recreation.



The dam was modified several times, ultimately measuring 38 feet high, 400 feet long and 20 feet wide at its crest. The dam had two uncontrolled earthen spillways. The main spillway was 380 feet long, 60 feet wide and located on the left side of the structure. A low point on the right side and away from the dam could also be used as a secondary spillway when the reservoir levels became too high. The embankment dam was located about 2,000 feet upstream from the Toccoa Falls and mostly consisted of residual soils and silt. The dam sat on a foundation of silt and stable biotite gneiss (rock). Within the dam embankment were two masonry structures. One helped support a pipe that was used as a low-level spillway. The other contained a penstock (pipe) for the hydroelectricity power plant. Neither was being used at the time of the flood.



On November 6, 1977, at 1:30 am, the Kelly Barnes Dam failed after four days of heavy rain: seven inches had fallen from November 2nd to 5th. Half of that between 6 pm and midnight on November 5th. The rain swelled Barnes Lake, which normally held 17,859,600 cubic feet of water, to an estimated 27,442,800 cubic feet of water. A total of 200 feet of the dam failed, causing a peak of 24,000 cubic feet per second maximum discharge to burst downstream.



The flood killed 39 people and destroyed nine houses, 18 house trailers, two college buildings and many motor vehicles. Five houses and five college buildings were also damaged. Two bridges on Toccoa Falls Drive and a culvert at County Farm Road were completely destroyed. The embankments at Georgia Highway 17 were destroyed on either side of the bridge, and one of the bridge abutments at Highview Road was destroyed. The water-supply pipe for the city of Toccoa was damaged and the city's water supply was contaminated for several days. The cost of the damage was $2.8 million.



After the flood, Georgia's Governor George Busbee called for an immediate investigation, which was carried out by a Federal Investigative Board of the United States Geological Survey. Their report was released December 21, 1977, with no specific causes cited for the failure. The investigators had no engineering plans for the dam and records of construction on the dam were based on witnesses, pictures, and newspaper articles.



The investigation did, however, cite several possible or probable causes. The failure of the dam's slope may have contributed to weakness in the structure, particularly in the heavy rain. A collapse of the low-level spillway could have also exacerbated this problem. A 1973 photo showed a 12-foot-high, 30-foot-wide slide had occurred on the downstream face of the dam, which may have also contributed or foreshadowed the dam failure. Overall, the dam itself was in poor condition and lacked a sufficient design. The dam had been placed on the "high hazard" list by the Army Corps of Engineers. Can't blame the COE on this one.



It was the worst natural disaster in Georgia in more than 40 years. The flood was the nation's worst since the West Virginia Buffalo Creek flood of 1972 in which a coal mine refuse dam, saturated by heavy rains, collapsed and flooded a valley, killing 118 persons. There is a memorial to the people who died at the base of the falls.



It tells the story of the tragedy.



It lists the names of the victims. Notice the same last names of several as entire families perished together, including several brothers in one of the basement dorm rooms.



But let’s not forget the beauty of these falls. These are my photos of the falls.



They are surely worth a visit at all times of the year as our GNW gal of day will attest.



We round out our top 20 Georgia Natural Wonders tomorrow. Lot of pressure on what should make the top 20. I welcome any input / suggestions.