Trek to World Granite Capital makes for a solid day trip

For the first time in months, we recently had a day free from sports activities and other engagements. Though we had tickets to an event in the evening, the world – or at least that part within a short drive of Atlanta – was ours for the day.

So we piled the kids in the car and drove to the middle of nowhere to look at six slabs of granite.  About 90 minutes northeast of our metro ‘burb, lies Elbert County, Ga. – home to the Georgia Guidestones.  From the road, these 16-foot upended markers might look a bit like a smaller version of Stonehenge, but ancient ruins they are not. The slabs were placed on a farm at the top of a hill in 1980 as “guidestones to an age of reason” by a mysterious benefactor known only by the pseudonym, R.C. Christian.

Some may take to heart the stones’ ten points of advice for survivors of a post-apocalyptic world, carved in English, Russian, Hebrew, Hindi, Arabic, Swahili, Chinese and Spanish.  Others may take them for a load of tosh. For a traveler looking for a destination, however, the Guidestones are worth pulling over on the side of the road for a quick look. We arrived there about 20 minutes ahead of a big rain storm, and found about 10 – 12 other people checking it out too.  

After the Guidestones, we continued our tour of all things granite as we headed into the city of Elberton, the “Granite Capital of the World”.  The rain arrived as we stepped into the Elberton Granite Museum and Exhibit. The musty smell of 50-year-old newsprint, a century’s worth of quarrying tools, faded photographs of quarries’ “men on the ledge” and the town’s fallen granite statue – known as Dutchy – captured the attention of even our eight and eleven-year-old daughters. (The free piece of granite at the end of the visit made it all worthwhile for our five-year-old.)         

Rural Georgia is dotted with all sorts of interesting places and things like this to see. Places you can see for free, and where your museum “docent” is an amiable man who knows everything there is to know about the granite business because he worked his way through every level during his long career.

Here are some other rural spots to consider next time you’re in search of a driving destination…

·         Pre-historic Indian petroglyphs carved into soapstone at Track Rock Gap, near Blairsville, Ga.   

·         Stonepile Gap in Lumpkin County is literally a pile of stones in the middle of an intersection, which sits atop the grave of a legendary Cherokee princess, Trahlyta. “Drop a stone upon her grave, and make a wish straight from your heart.”  

·         Take a tour of telecommunications history from 1876 to present day at the Georgia Rural Telephone Museum, the largest collection of antique telephones and telephone memorabilia in the world. Located west of Cordele in Leslie, Ga. 

·         The Iron Horse statue that caused such a stir on the UGA campus in the 1950s that it was permanently relocated to a farm in Greene County. You can see it from the road (Georgia Highway 15) in the middle of a field just before you cross over the Oconee River.

Where do you head for a quick day trip? Have you explored any of these out-of-the-way destinations? Do you have other quirky sites in Georgia or nearby states to add to the list?