Borderline Dispute

Road maps say that the border of Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina is a crow-flies straight line along the 35th parallel from Scaly Mountain, N.C., to Guild, Tenn. But for more than a century a rather quaint controversy has cooked over whether an 1811 surveyor made a southward error --thrown off by a forest fire and Indian harassment--and gave Tennessee and North Carolina some 300 sq. mi. of mountainous woods that actually belong to Georgia.

Mountaineers along the borderline do not raise the issue often, since, according to Georgia Historian E. Merton Coulter. 81, "They pay taxes to one state one year and another the next and no taxes at all some years." Now Georgia State Legislator. Larry Thomason has earnestly set off with Geodetic Survey maps to claim Georgia's lost territories. Thomason has even planted a Georgia flag 500 yds. north of the accepted boundary. If Thomason's claim were to stick, the entire southern half of Chattanooga would sink into Georgia, and Tennessee's Senator William Brock would be out of a job, since his Lookout Mountain residence would be inside Georgia.

For its part, North Carolina has reacted with revolutionary aplomb. The legislature in Raleigh resolved that "immediate steps should be taken for the actual defense of North Carolina's borders with Georgia, including measures to mobilize the North Carolina highway patrol, North Carolina National Guard and, if necessary as a last resort, build fortifications on the present border."

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