Mary Belk: Nothing like a night in old stagecoach inn

Fast moving, rumble, tumble stagecoaches. They call to mind teams of lathered horses at a dead run, corset-encased ladies delicately dabbing moisture from their brows, Bible-toting preachers dressed in black, and bad-boy gamblers with hidden handguns.

Truth is most people traveled by stagecoach in American frontier days. Trips were slow and uncomfortable. The coaches bumped along night and day, covering about 100 miles in 24 hours. Passengers, grimy with dust in summer and shivering with cold in winter, tried to sleep on the hard seats. Out west, crude adobe stations provided food for passengers and horses. Back east there were stagecoach inns.

I spent the summer of 1968 at a stagecoach inn in the foggy foothills of North Georgia. Tumbledown Jarrett Manor on the outskirts of Toccoa, Ga., spread out on a grassy bluff. I was working for the Georgia Historical Society as part of an archaeological dig.

We spent our first night on the floor of the wooden building, which had fallen into a state of disrepair. But the next day we pitched our tents on the lawn and slept there for the rest of the summer. Our bathroom was an old outhouse, and we took showers in a makeshift stall in the corner of the shed where artifacts were washed and catalogued. We cooked our meals on a campfire.

Bill Kelso, the state archaeologist, lived in a tiny turtle of a trailer with his wife and two toddlers. He’d gotten there early with compass and transit, making maps and setting up a grid system with stakes and twine. Neat, precise squares covered with sheets of plastic pockmarked the grounds.

My plan was to get a bronze tan on the dig. Instead I spent most of that summer underneath the house with a trowel and a soft, two-inch paintbrush sweeping dirt into a dustpan.

We found evidence of Creek Indian occupation, a dry well, a smokehouse, a graveyard, and a kitchen away from the main structure. The inn, called Traveler’s Rest, was dated in the mid-1800s. Inside was a public lobby where stagecoach tickets were sold and men could smoke and have a few drinks. There was a large dining room and a ladies’ parlor where the women could rest. Upstairs were rooms for travelers to sleep.

I’m probably one of the few people around who can claim to have slept in an authentic stagecoach inn. When I think of that era, I imagine toothless Gabby Hayes riding shotgun, fighting off Injuns, then stopping at a stagecoach station for a mug of “sassparilly.” Then I conjure up visions of rainy nights in a tent listening to Braves’ baseball on a transistor radio, ankles covered in redbug bites, early morning dew and coffee cooked on coals. And I recall the murder mystery I planned to write. It would be set at a dig in North Georgia and called “Trowel and Error.” For me those times seem as long gone as the old stagecoach days.

Mary Belk lives in Auburn and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.