Tennga, Ga., is getting ready for its first-ever town reunion. The old Wilson's Hardware sign is usually stored away in safety these days. But a few decades ago it advertised the store to traffic along U.S. Highway 411 on what was once a major route to Florida. From left to right are Gordon Wilson, Gary Hawkins, Becky Dilbeck and Woody Hilliard.
Downtown TenngaTENNGA, Ga. - For people who grew up in Tennga, it is much more than a crossroads on U.S. 411 at the state line.
So as the community approaches the hundredth anniversary of its naming, there is going to be a reunion.
On Oct. 1, people from around Tennessee and Georgia, and almost from sea to sea, will be coming back for an afternoon of remembering, talking and looking at old photos. They hope that some of the new Tenngans will come to Tennga Baptist Church, starting at 1:30 p.m., too.
Tennga's beginnings go back to the Cherokee Nation. But this reunion began in a much more modern way, on Facebook.
Jane Keith Jeffords, who grew up in Tennga, started the Facebook page that now has over 230 members. Becky Dilbeck asked the crowd if anybody wanted to have a reunion.
Much of what once made Tennga is gone now - a hotel by the railroad tracks, mills for grinding corn, the earliest textile mill in the region and a school. Now the post office may be disappearing, too.
But there are new neighbors, and a convenience store is reopening across from a new Dollar General store.
So it's a good time for a reunion, said Gary Hawkins, whose grandfather had a gristmill here.
"At the crossroads here, there was always something going on," Gordon Wilson said. "This was regional, because of the highway, 411, and the railroad. Even a mile north of Conasauga people came here for groceries, sugar to make liquor or whatever."
"It was a kind of going little place," Hawkins said.
Wilson went on. "My dad, until the gun laws changed in 1968, for years he sold every hunter and everybody guns here. He was in general merchandise, and people came from Benton and Chatsworth. There were five stores, six if you count the gas station." Wilson said.
Both men remember talk from older times about a movie theater, lumberyard and an ice cream parlor.
They also remember talk of bootleggers here, even though they were too young to know much about that part of Tennga life.
"The most famous bar was the Stagger Inn," Dilbeck. "But my daddy called it the Stagger Inn and Drag 'em Out."
From here, people could catch a bus to Cleveland or Chatsworth, said Becky Dilbeck.
Like many who grew up here, she knows how her family got here.
"My family came in 1850 from Blount County, Tenn., the Townsend area," she said. "They settled into Cohutta Springs first."
It was a crossroads between Cherokees and settlers before the railroad came. Wilson said the name then was "Whip," short for an Indian name for a bird, Whippoorwill.
"This is either true or it got very distorted over the years," said Wilson.
The railroad came through in 1904 and the stop was named for its location on the Tennessee-Georgia state line.
Tennga was one of the spots along U.S. Highway 411 where chenille bedspread stops transformed into carpet mills and now North Georgia's worldwide industry.
It was a great place and time to grow up, they all said, standing beside the highway as carpet and logging trucks roar past. The kind of place where everyone sat out on the porches on Halloween and waited for the kids to come by.
"Nobody was poor here," Dilbeck said.
"If they became something, it's because of what they learned here," Wilson said.
"There was no class distinction," Hilliard said.
If some of those sons and daughters come to the reunion in fancy cars, Hawkins said, just remember, they are not showing off. That just happens to be their car.