Toccoa River

About

Toccoa River, Georgia — 1830s-1850s Cherokee Removal, 1926 Blue Ridge Dam 1,553-ft, TVA 1939, 2010s Fannin County 80-mi. Systematic study of the Toccoa's flow arrived with the U.S. Geological Survey's gauging program. The discharge record at station 03559000, the Toccoa River near Blue Ridge, begins on October 1, 1898, tracking a 233-square-mile basin. Those readings — the first comprehensive hydrological look at the river — later informed the engineering that would transform it. Long before the dam, the 1870s USGS surveys and early gauging work established the baseline; water-quality science followed decades behind the flow measurements.

The valley the gauges measured was already scarred. Logging reached the Toccoa watershed in stages, beginning with local mills and drives in the 1830s and escalating into full industrial clear-cutting between the 1880s and the 1920s, when northern timber companies bought up cheap mountain tracts across Fannin County. The Marietta and North Georgia Railroad reached the county in the summer of 1886, and the town of Blue Ridge was incorporated on October 24, 1887, at the line's terminus, giving loggers a railroad outlet for timber hauled from once-remote hollows. Crews blasted grades into the ridges and built splash dams across mountain streams — log structures dynamited to flush felled timber downstream in a single instant flood. By the 1920s roughly 80 percent of the region's old-growth forest had been cut, leaving eroded slopes and devastated fisheries.

Congress answered with the Weeks Act of 1911, authorizing federal purchase of ruined watershed land, and on July 9, 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Chattahoochee National Forest, which reclaimed much of the cutover Toccoa country and today spans 749,000 acres. In the same decade the timber companies were pulling out, the Toccoa Electric Power Company dammed the river to build Blue Ridge Dam. The Tennessee Valley Authority acquired the dam from TEPCO in 1939, folding the Toccoa into the larger apparatus that manages the Tennessee River watershed.

The river's human history runs deeper than the logging era. The Toccoa flows through the heart of what was the Cherokee Nation's Georgia territory, and 'Toccoa' is believed to derive from a Cherokee word meaning 'beautiful.' During the Revolutionary War, Tugaloo Town — a significant Cherokee settlement at the confluence of Toccoa Creek and the Tugaloo River — was destroyed by members of the Georgia and South Carolina militias. The Civil War split the valley too: on September 2, 1864, Union private Edward Callahan O'Kelley and his brother John Pendleton O'Kelley, a Confederate soldier AWOL from the 42nd Georgia Infantry, passed near the river's banks as they made their way toward Union lines in Cleveland, Tennessee.

Today the river runs in distinct sections. The Blue Ridge Dam tailwater is Class I–II and premier trout water; the reach from Deep Hole to Shallowford Bridge climbs to Class II–III and holds the best whitewater; and Shallowford Bridge to McCaysville is a Class I–II scenic float. The cold dam releases those early surveys first quantified are the same flows that sustain the trout fishery, where brown and rainbow trout hold year-round. Designated a Georgia Scenic River and running largely through the Chattahoochee National Forest, the Toccoa is now managed under Georgia's Total Maximum Daily Load program, which sets pollutant limits for a stream impaired by more than a century of logging, agricultural runoff, and sediment. The Clean Water Act of 1972 first brought it under formal assessment. The river supports the Blue Ridge, McCaysville, and Suches economies.