What is the history of Cornelia, Georgia?
Cornelia was first settled by non-Native Americans in around 1860, along an old boundary line between the Cherokee and Creek Indian tribes. Workers of the Charlotte-Airline Railroad (later Southern Railway (US)Southern Railway) invaded the virgin forest in 1872 and began building railway line from Gainesville to Toccoa. In 1882, the Blue Ridge and Atlantic Railroad opened a line that extended northward from the Charlotte-Airline to Clarkesville and Tallulah Falls, GeorgiaTallulah Falls. The Tallulah Falls Railway, as it came to be called, carried passengers and freight from Cornelia to Franklin, North Carolina. The railroad depot was originally called Blaine for the Republican presidential candidate, James Gillespie Blaine, but the cluster of houses was called Rabun Gap Junction. When the first charter of the town was secured by an attorney representing the railroad, Judge Pope Barrow, the name was changed to Cornelia in honor of his wife. The official date of the town’s incorporation
