Clear Creek - A History
A History of Clear Creek and Its Valley
The Brookwood Hills neighborhood is bounded on the east by 55 acres of woodland contained in a narrow valley known to residents as “Clear Creek.” The larger trees there, about 200 years old, date from the period when Creek Indians fought with their neighboring Cherokees. The valley takes its name from Clear Creek, the stream that created it.
The Creek’s bedrock is the ground floor of the valley. The Creek’s basement has rocks, still unseen, that are about 1.2 billion years old. The erosion of those basement rocks produced sediment that was changed into the ground floor rocks that underlay the neighborhood.
From 1.2 billion years ago, it is fast forward to the mountain building in Georgia that occurred some 325 million years ago. At that time, what is now Africa was slowly sliding under proto-North America and closing what was then the proto-Atlantic Ocean. The process lifted and buckled the land and formed the Appalachian Mountains to a height and mass that rivaled the present-day Himalayas. The process not only folded but also buried the very old sedimentary rocks. The process pushed these rocks deep beneath Georgia’s surface. There heat and pressure changed them into the gneiss, granite, and schist that outcrop in the Creek today. A 30-foot high granite outcrop in the Clear Creek valley just behind middle Camden Road probably was formed three miles deep. It is now revealed, like Stone Mountain, by hundreds of millions of years of erosion.
The Creek and its valley had not formed about 100 million years later when what is now Africa split away from proto-North America and the Atlantic Ocean and eastern North America began to form. Give or take another 100 million years, a very warm Georgia supported dinosaurs and other reptiles. As these became extinct about 60 million years ago, camels, mammoths, elephants, bison, wolves, mountain lions and others had no Clear Creek to drink from.
Did the Creek begin to form as long ago as the last two million years? Maybe. The climate turned colder then, glaciers soaked up the oceans, sea levels rose and fell hundreds of feet. We can be reasonably sure that Clear Creek was present some 15,000 years ago, when glaciers again locked up ocean waters and dropped sea levels several hundred feet. That period gave Asian peoples a land bridge to North America. Some crossed, trekked south into the western part of our continent, and then migrated, over thousands of years, to the eastern woodlands.
The contours of the hills before that time gave rise to the Creek’s beginnings. A ridge to the west, the one that supports Peachtree Street, allowed water and sediment to drain into a depression caused by earlier folding and erosion of the underlying rock. That ridge supplied feeder streams to that valley. Another ridge, to the east, that now supports higher land to the east of Monroe Drive, allowed water to flow down into the valley from the east to augment the streams coming down from Peachtree. Peachtree Creek was here then and helped create the gradient that guided Clear Creek on its present course.
Clear Creek drained an area starting south of North Avenue. There is a fairly large and steep valley that North, Ponce de Leon, and Piedmont Avenues slide into and rise out of. Clear Creek formed it. The Creek created the wide, flat valley in Piedmont Park, south and north from Tenth Street. Woodland Indians, the predecessors to the Creeks and Cherokees, most certainly frequented this valley and used the Creek.
In the 18th century the Creek Indians (the Muscogee, in their language) by virtue of an often-violated agreement with the Cherokee, held the territory to the east and south of the Chattahoochee River. The Cherokees held the area to the north and west. On what is now Ponce de Leon Avenue, near what was once the Atlanta Crackers baseball park, then Sears Roebuck, and later City Hall East, the Ponce de Leon Spring, as it was then called, fed Clear Creek. There, in 1821 and earlier, Robert Young traded with the Indians. Young went on to help build an important road, part of which is now Peachtree Road, from Atlanta to Flowery Branch, about 15 miles south of Gainesville.
By treaty signed at Indian Springs, Georgia in January 1821, the Creeks ceded land containing Clear Creek valley to the United States. The Cherokee later ceded any claims they may have had. After the treaty became known, white settlers, moving from other areas of Georgia, particularly Gwinnett County cleared and farmed the newly acquired land.
In 1822, Meredith Collier moved his wife and seven children with him (the other eight children were still to come) from Gwinnett County to a substantial tract of land along Clear Creek and what was then a road that became Peachtree Street. Meredith built his farm house on a hill in Sherwood Forest with a back porch that overlooked the Creek. His son, George Washington (Wash) ended up with the house and the land in what is now Ansley Park and Sherwood Forest. His house stood until around 1868 until it was replaced on the same foundation by a newer one that still stands. Meredith’s son, Andrew Jackson, came to own what is now Brookwood and Collier Hills. His house was near the southwest corner of what are now Peachtree and Collier Roads and his grist mill was on Tanyard Creek. Meredith’s son, Wesley, ended up with the land around what is now West Wesley Road. They all farmed. Wash branched out into being a builder, post master at was briefly the Clear Creek Post Office, and real estate developer. As these brothers cleared land, raised livestock, and hunted over their extensive acreage, wolves, bears, foxes, many deer, and eagles flew over or lurked around them.
A mile or so farther south, Samuel Walker acquired other land bisected by Clear Creek. It encompassed the present-day Piedmont Park. His son, Ben, acquired it from his father around 1834, built a mill on Clear Creek near the Park Drive bridge. He later built a stone house that became the nucleus of the Piedmont Driving Club building after Wash Collier decided he did not want to sell to the Club’s founders.
Like many Atlanta creeks, especially Peachtree and Tanyard Creeks, Clear Creek played a part in the Battle of Atlanta in July, 1864. Atlanta’s defenses called for some Confederate forces to meet the Federal ones as the Federals were crossing Peachtree Creek. As part of that plan, Confederate forces were to advance north in the Clear Creek valley to intercept the Federal forces on their left flank. Poor communication and uneven progress delayed the Confederate advance and the Federals had gained the heights at Brighton Road. From there, they directed their fire into the Clear Creek valley to the detriment of the Confederates. The Battle of Peachtree Creek is better described in current day terms as the Battle of Piedmont Hospital, Collier Road, and Tanyard Creek Park as that is where most of the fighting occurred.
Sherman’s burning of Atlanta probably consumed much lumber grown in the Clear Creek woods. Early Atlanta was a town built of wood. Wash Collier, for example, in the 1850s built a frame building at Five Points for a grocery store. He bragged that he hewed the lumber himself. It must have come from his farm. Atlanta was growing, wood was cheap, and the Clear Creek and other woodlands were nearby for those who needed them. Logging and farming explain the broad plains of Ansley and Piedmont Parks as well as the small amount of first growth forest in the remaining woodlands bounding Brookwood Hills.
The growth of Atlanta as a transportation hub that began with the railways in the 1840s slowly reduced the amount of farm land, woods, and menagerie that inhabited the Clear Creek valley. A look at the proposed route of the Atlanta Beltline trail and rail demonstrates how railroads literally encircled Atlanta. Railroads to the north and south of Brookwood Hills cross the Clear Creek valley and cut through Ansley Park and Collier Hills to the east and west.
Atlanta’s east-west connections were difficult in early times because its creeks and ridges ran more or less in a north-south direction. Around the 1870’s, however, Clear Creek could not stop the Atlanta Street Railway from running a horse-drawn passenger wagon over a long 30-foot high trestle that spanned the Creek where Penn Avenue now runs, to the east and north of Piedmont and Ponce de Leon Avenues. In the Atlanta History Center’s collection, a photograph looks up at this scene from the bed of Clear Creek as it appeared in the summer of 1874.
Clear Creek remained a respectable stream until the 1880s. The City had grown and had not constructed a pipe line to dispose of sewer and storm water. The City’s creeks, when the pipes were far enough from the City for the waste to be out of smelling range, offered a cheap alternative so the City directed that waste into Clear Creek and other Atlanta waterways. By 1910, the number of people within smelling range of Clear Creek had increased substantially, and the City began a system of combined sewer and storm water drainage to relieve the problem. From 1917 to 1921, the City installed a 48” combined sewer and storm water pipe that still operates, buried in Clear Creek valley alongside of the Creek. The manholes still pop up in the Brookwood Hills woods.
The Creek also was beset, in its Brookwood Hills portion and perhaps elsewhere, with a commercial sand and gravel operation from 1920s to the 1940s that disturbed the stream bed and created dead-water pools during periods of low water. As noted above, the Creek turns the corner of a 30-foot granite out-cropping as it runs through the Brookwood Hills woods. There are some signs that quarrying of that granite took place either as a part of or before the sand-and-gravel operation. It seems probable, too, that the Creek once ran down the present course of Monroe Drive and that of lower Camden Road.
As Atlanta expanded into a city, Clear Creek was captured, straightened, and buried for much of its course. Almost every part of the Creek south of Atlanta’s Botanical Garden has been covered over. A Brookwood Hills' resident remembers walking inside a buried Clear Creek near the intersection of Monroe Drive and Tenth Street as a part of his architectural duties in the 1970’s.
Clear Creek valley has faced other threats from time to time. The construction of I-85 in the late 1950s threatened Clear Creek. The 1950s construction created Armour-Ottley Industrial Park from the fill dirt the contractors dumped there. The construction of that industrial area drastically steepened the valley’s east sides in its Brookwood Hills portion. In the early 1970s, Georgia’s Department of Transportation proposed extending West Peachtree Street right through the Brookwood Hills section of the valley. Fortunately, in the 1970’, the plan to widen I-85 into twelve lanes and the construction of MARTA resulted in little damage to the Creek.
The Creek has not always been benign. Clear Creek flows modestly most of the time, but after a heavy rain, the power it demonstrates explains how it eroded to bedrock through a valley once filled with sediment. In the early 1960’s the City allowed a developer to extend Camden Road into the Clear Creek flood plan and develop houses there. In every decade these homeowners have suffered millions of dollars in damages from flooding. The house at the intersection of middle and new Camden always took the brunt, until finally, after the flood of 2009, the owners raised it. Houses on the south side of the Camden extension also found their foundations and sometimes their living rooms full of water every decade. The 2009 flood was so destructive it not only flooded the south side of new Camden but also some of the north side, a circumstance that had not been seen before. Now, several of those houses have been raised higher from their foundations.
In the 1990s, the Chattahoochee River Keeper gave Clear Creek a more permanent place in the ecology of Atlanta. That group sued the City in order to clean up the Chattahoochee River. Dirt, sewer and storm overflows draining into Atlanta’s creeks, Clear Creek among them, wound up in that River.
As a result, the City agreed to protect the River by acquiring land and conservation easements on land in Atlanta’s watersheds, including the Clear Creek Watershed. In 2006 the City bought a conservation easement from the Brookwood Hills Community Club on the neighborhood’s 55 acres of woodland. This easement insures that this part of the Clear Creek valley will be forever free from development.
Also, the City agreed to treat part of the combined sewer and storm water overflow that was draining into the Creek during periods of high rainfall, and the City in 2010 constructed a new park, the Old Fourth Ward Park, that allowed some of Clear Creek to peep up and form a small lake just south of North Avenue. That lake not only enhances the park, but it also serves as a reservoir to catch and hold storm water until it can be safely channeled into the Creek.
As it did thousands of years ago, a cleaner Clear Creek flows eventually into the Gulf of Mexico. Now some of its former wildlife - hawks, coyotes, foxes, owls, ducks, raccoons, possums, and an occasional deer are homesteading there. Clear Creek is healthier than it has been in the past 120 years. The conservation easement and a new appreciation of the value of natural places should help keep it that way.
Note. Authority for the facts set forth in this article is found in secondary sources: an on-line article on Georgia’s Geology found in the New Georgia Encyclopedia, Franklin Garrett’s two volume set, Atlanta and Its Environs, Stuart V. Ward Jr.’s manuscript on Clear Creek, tomitronics.com article on the G.W. Collier house, and other resources at the Keenan Library in the Atlanta History Center.
Jerry Luxemburger
March, 2011
