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  ELECTIONS at Meeting November 4th in Greensboro Our next quarterly meeting is on Sunday, November 4th, beginning at 2:00 p.m., sharp! We will meet in the Greensboro Episcopal Church Activities Building, located back of the church. This is where we met last November, if you remember! Come to downtown Greensboro, go north on Main Street to the Episcopal Church, and turn right just before you get to it, and go into the Activities Building parking lot. We'll have signs at the outside entrance to the meeting room. Carolyn Reynolds Parker is providing light refreshments, and we'll wind up so you can get home before it's too dark! We will hold elections
at the November meeting, and the Nominating Committee: Ellen Whitaker,
(706-583-0665), Carolyn Reynolds Parker (706-467-2684), and Jim Hunt (706-467-2880)
are assembling a slate of officers for the new year. If you wish to be
included as an officer or board member, please get in touch with them.
We will discuss expansion efforts, progress of our projects to date, and
plans for the new year. The "Association" plans
to help the Forest Service raise funds for specific projects. The Forest
Service provided a list of proposed projects at a recent executive board
meeting, and "Inter-pretive Trails at Scull Shoals" was one of the requested
projects! We hope the Association will be able to assist the Friends in
raising the sizable funds needed to put in the planned toilet building,
plus the decks and boardwalk for the trails currently laid out around
Scull Shoals and the Beaver Pond. We welcome all our new
members who have joined us since August! We hope you will let us know
what your interests are, and how you want to help in the Friends efforts
to improve the facilities and services at Scull Shoals. We look forward
to meeting you and getting you involved at our upcoming meeting, November
4th in Greensboro! Again, Welcome new Friends! The date of the Fall Work Day, September 28, 2001, was essentially set when John Reiter e-mailed to say he and Bob Skarda wanted to come that Friday with some of their family members and do some cleaning. The date was announced to the membership by internet, and that day we had a small, but very enthusiastic and hard-working crew who accomplished great things! Working that day were Bob and John with sons David and Adam Reiter, plus Peggy Sommer and Jack Wynn. They all trimmed privet from along the edge of the raceway, to allow visitors to see over into the power plant foundations. Then they cleared out the vegetation on and around the foundations themselves. David and Adam cleared a trail across the raceway, and then from the foundation stones over to the Oconee River Trail. Now it's easy to walk from the grassy downtown area over to the foundations, and back by the river. Once the rains refill the raceway, we can still get visitors in there from the river trail to see the foundations. Adam and Jack began to clear weedy growth from the tops of the warehouse walls (more work is needed there yet). After a break Bob cleared the privet and weeds around the blacksmith shop, and then he, John David and Adam cleared along the trail over to the Two Chimney House and back down to the store-warehouse. When a bridge crossing Scull Shoals Creek is completed behind the warehouse, there will be a nice round-trip trail for visitors. Preparing for the October 13th PIT testing, the energetic crew trimmed a trail from the parking lot into House Site 1750 (nicknamed "Ellen's House," since she helped first record it). They spent about half an hour clearing privet and briars from an area over and around that house site and a brick pile, site 1744. They were then ready for testing. While all this was going
on, UGA Forestry students Will Thomas and Leigh Youngner began to locate
and flag the edges of the Scull Shoals Historic Area. This was for their
term project to find ways to eradicate the privet from the site. Their
first step was to define the area of the study, which is about 35 acres.
If the Forest Service adopts their eradication proposals, we may one day
be rid of this Asian intruder that has taken over so much of the village
area. The August 18 Friends quarterly meeting was held at the home of Alice and Richard Curtis. Twenty people were present, and were served a great buffet luncheon at the meeting's end. Treasurer Gale Farlow has received official notification of our acceptance by the IRS of our non-profit (501.c.3) status. We are officially a non-profit, so that means that any donations made to the organization will be tax-deductible. The land acquisition project led by Jim Hunt has been slowed by the take-over of Georgia Pacific by a western company. We will have to pursue our requests for a donation of space with the new company, once they are establish here. The first mock-up of the proposed exhibit board was presented, and members looked them over, and suggested some changes. Athens Banner-Herald and Greensboro Herald Journal have given us good publicity the past few months. A new paper for Oglethorpe County published by Carol Nimmons ran an article featuring a picture of Vincent Smith at Scull Shoals in its first issue. New trails have been flagged, and were to be inspected by Mike Tipton of the Forest Service late in August. They will need drop-off places for busses, and a deck is proposed as an overlook at the Beaver Pond for environmental education classes. The trails are designed to stay with the land contours and avoid erosion. In several places the trails are on old roadbeds or firebreaks. [Note later: Mike Tipton and Jack Wynn walked the trails on August 31, and Mike approved the locations. We still need a biologist's report on them, and an archaeological write-up as well. We will do the archaeological report ourselves this winter.] Carolyn Reynolds Parker and Martha Jones were asked to write a letter of thanks to Mr. Seaborn Ashley's family for all the work he did in getting our organization chartered with the State of Georgia back in 1996. Mr. Ashley died of cancer earlier this year. A nominating committee
for new officers was appointed, consisting of Ellen Whitaker, Carolyn
Reynolds Parker, and Jim Hunt. The election is to be held at the November
meeting. A Tour Guide Training Class was set for September 15th, and a
good group was signed up to attend. Besides the work day and October 12-13th Passport In Time project and public tours, there have been some other activities at Scull shoals. The Forest Service's Older Americans visit once a week to clean up the recreation area, empty trash cans, mow the grass, and run their weed-eaters around the buildings and other features, to keep the place looking great. Friends of Scull shoals have provided a porta-john again this fall for the volunteers and visitors to our fall tours and other activities. This is paid for from the proceeds of the tours, and was arranged for from Athens by Ellen Whitaker. It certainly has been a welcome addition to the site, as it is cleaned out weekly.. We have had a special tour of the site for the Athens chapter of the Colonial Dames of the 17th Century, on Wednesday September 12. This group wants to contribute towards a second picnic table at the site, so we may want to match them in this effort. They support educational projects and mark historic places in the state. They may also cooperate with us in the future. On Sunday, October 14th, John Reiter and Bob Skarda guided a small group of Sierra Club members on a tour of the site. They were there following a state-wide meeting over in Madison. Special thanks to John and Bob for staying over for that group. Recently Peggy Sommer
guided a group of Brownie Scouts from Eatonton on a tour of the site,
at the request of their Scout leader, Margot Reynolds of Greensboro. The
Brownies were there on their half-day off from school, and this provided
an extra educational experience for them all. Thanks, Peggy! Each time we have the PIT digs, we take our archaeological tools and supplies from storage at the Oconee Work Center, load them into a couple of pickup trucks, and haul them to the site. This is often done by one or two people. At the site we off-load and spread the equipment around as needed. At the day's end we have to load 'em back into the trucks and haul them back to the work center and unload and re-store them again. We have lots of help at the site to unload and re-load the trucks, but the off-loading and storage has often be left to Jill by herself, at the end of a very long day. If we had a covered, lockable trailer to contain all the bulky items, we could simply hook up the trailer and haul the gear to the site, use the stuff as needed, and then re-pack and haul it back to the Work Center and park the locked trailer, safe and ready for the next project. Does anyone have or know where we can get a small to medium-sized U-haul-type enclosed trailer that we could use for this purpose? Ideally it should be a donation to the Friends of Scull Shoals, Inc., for which the donor would receive credit for his or her taxes. This newsletter is a publication of the non-profit Friends of Scull Shoals, Inc. Jack T. Wynn, Editor For information on the
Friends, this Newsletter or planned activities, please contact me by phone
at 770-536-2564, or by e-mail at mfjtwynn@bellsouth.net. If you have internet
access, please send me your e-mail address. We can save lots of money
by sending the newsletters by e-mail! Our tour visitors enjoyed the enthusiasm of three new tour guides, Debra Skarda, John Reiter, (with contributions by Bob Skarda). Treasurer Gale Farlow sold tickets to over two dozen visitors, plus children, for the morning tours and another dozen, with kids, for the afternoon tours. The PIT volunteers worked enthusiastically on four sites. DOT archaeologist Erica Jeter led the dump site dig with Don Lilley and two new PIT folks, Gina Beckham and Patsy Harris, in front of the warehouse. Becky Bruce led Sammie Stooksbury, Donna Shaw, Phil Bainbridge, and others to uncover the cut granite block arch in the power plant foundation. Results were spectacular! Jill Harrell directed a third crew composed of Bob Skarda, Ellen Whitaker, and Beca Tucker, who cleaned around site 1750 ("Ellen's House") and started a test square there. They also cleared off Site 1744, a large brick pile thought to be a push pile from the parking lot construction in the 1970's. Both 1750 and 1744 ("Beca's Bricks") were in the dense privet north of the parking lot. As Beca swept the top of the bricks, a brick wall appeared, so that will be investigated in the future. Meanwhile, Cassandra Flowers brought some of her fifth-grade enrichment class students from Sumter County to work. She had one father and four students, including her grandson, clearing out the square with the large granite blocks in it, next to "Cassandra's Chimney." While the digs were going
on, Beca and Jack began surveying to place the new sites within the overall
site grid, which Jack and Mary Frank Wynn completed on October 19th. At
lunchtime, Phil warmed up the new grill and provided huge hamburgers and
fixin's for all who needed lunch. Thanks, Phil! (If I left your name off
this description, please forgive, and do return!) The Friends are making
great plans for activities at the old mill village, and they all take
people and money. We are developing trails and interpretive signs as a
first step, and plans are in the works for bathroom facilities! If you
have not yet joined our non-profit organization, or if you have a buddy
you think would enjoy learning and working with us, we hope you will bring
them into the Friends of Scull Shoals. Any and all donations are cheerfully
accepted! New and old members, please fill in the form, and send it in
with your generous check. Thanks! |
