Traveler's Rest and the Tugaloo Crossroads

On Georgia Highway 123, amid the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, stands Traveler’s Rest Historic Site. The house stands within two miles of the site of Old Tugaloo Town, an important Cherokee village. It is situated on a crossroads at the southern end of the Great Wagon Road, down which a wave of European-American migration poured to fill the land east of the Appalachians in the mid-eighteenth century. Its history encompasses the Cherokees, migration, frontier war, and gold rush; it includes the development of Traveler’s Rest as a stagecoach inn/tavern into its long years as a plantation center; through Civil War and Reconstruction, the gradual decline of land and family is taken to the present century, where Traveler’s Rest becomes the physical embodiment of history transfigured into legend. The history of Traveler’s Rest is the history of a people and a heritage, reflected in the structure that developed with the years.

Robert Eldridge Bouwman was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1948. He attended Florida Presbyterian College and completed his graduate studies in history at Emory University, where he received his PhD in 1975. Bouwman worked as a freelance historian, during which time he researched and wrote Traveler’s Rest and the Tugaloo Crossroads. He has taught at Piedmont College, Gainesville State College, Kennesaw State University, and the University of North Georgia, where he teaches today.