By Jimmy Carter

President Carter wrote this for the Preface to the Flint River Guidebook

As a boy growing up in Archery, I worked fields that drained into Choctahatchee (or as we called it, Chock-li-hatchet) Creek. Choctahatchee Creek joins Kinchafoonee Creek, which merges with Muckalee Creek and flows into the Flint River just above Albany. The Choctahatchee was where I fished. It was where I learned about the out-of-doors, where I learned to explore, and where I learned how not to get lost. It’s where my playmates and I, and occasionally my father, had many hours and days together. We had an immersion in the natural world that has marked my whole existence. The Choctahatchee drainage is really the origin of my life. I still feel more at home and more in a natural element and closer to God when I’m out in the woods by myself, or just with Rosalyn, than at any other time.

During those childhood years on the Choctahatchee, I developed an appreciation for the protection of at least part of the world the way God made it. It affected my life when, as a state senator, I had to deal with natural resources. It was a part of my attitude when I became governor. I was one of the founders of the Georgia Conservancy; I advocated the protection of the Chattahoochee River, particularly in the Atlanta area, and, as governor, I created the Georgia Heritage Trust, which had a budget of $11 million the first year. (more…)

By Claude Terry

Editor’s Note: When Claude Terry wrote this story for Brown’s Guide to Georgia Magazine in 1973, he was a professor of microbiology at Emory University. A scientist by training and an expert outdoorsman by nature, Claude was among a small number of pioneering Georgia environmentalists who helped Jimmy Carter and other state and federal government officials see and appreciate the Flint as well as other Georgia rivers. He was one of the original Friends of the River, the group that successfully lobbied for designation of a portion of the Chattahoochee River in Atlanta as a National Recreation Area. He founded Southeastern Expeditions, a rafting outfitter on the Chattooga River in northeast Georgia. He was one of the founders of American Rivers Conservation Council, now American Rivers, and was recently recognized by that organization for his conservation efforts on behalf of rivers. For a story on Claude and his Georgia river experience that appeared in the Atlanta Journal Constitution on April 23, 2008, click here. The photo is Claude and his son, Mike, on the Chattooga River in 1972.

Take a river labeled “Georgia’s Number One Scenic River” by the Natural Areas Council, add the spice of three controversial dams which will drown this river valley, cap that off with the fact that this stream offers the best whitewater canoeing in middle Georgia and you can only be talking about Georgia’s Unique Flint River. Fishermen float and hike the river, canoeists drift down the easy stretches or risk boat and limb in Yellow Jacket Shoals, and hunters prowl the adjacent forests in large numbers to stalk the plentiful deer. (more…)

By Eugene H. Methvin

This story by Georgia native Eugene Methvin originally appeared in Readers Digest in 1974. It was reprinted in The Flint River Guidebook with permission.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1972, Georgia’s Gov. Jimmy Carter had been besieged with pleas to block a proposed federal dam and “save the Flint River.” Finally, in August, the governor took an overnight canoe trip to see for himself the source of the uproar.

The Flint River rises in Atlanta. Leaving the city, it is a greasy, sticky industrial sludge. But after tumbling through the Piedmont Plateau for 30 miles, it becomes a healthy highland stream that cuts through four steep ridges, forming the beautiful Flint River gorges, before spilling out into the coastal plain. In this magnificent fall-line passage of singing waters and hardwood forest, teeming wildlife thrives. Fishermen flock to try the Flint River bass, a prized game fish that spawns nowhere else, while canoeists test themselves on swirling white-water rapids.

“If we are going to destroy all this natural beauty,” Carter said to his fellow camper, Joe Tanner, commissioner of the state’s Department of Natural Resources, “we better make sure that what we get in return is worth the price.”

Back in the state capital, the two men began asking questions of federal planners – and soon found themselves grappling with gravely flawed government machinery for dealing with the twin crises of energy demands and environmental quality. The lessons they learned are vital to all Americans. (more…)

By SHERRI SMITH BROWN

Illustrations by Roel Wielinga

From the Flint River to the Chattahoochee River is a land that is tightly intertwined with the history of Georgia and America. Within this region sprang events with national scope. What was occurring in America was reflected in what was happening in the region, and events that occurred in the region greatly effected the policies of an emerging nation. (more…)

After being told by the Tarleton twins that Ashley Wilkes was to marry his cousin Melanie Hamilton, Scarlett O’Hara stood on the road to Tara awaiting her father, Gerald O’Hara’s, return from Twelve Oaks, the plantation across the Flint River where Ashley lived.

“Her eyes followed the winding road, blood-red now after the morning rain. In her thought she traced its course as it ran down the hill to the sluggish Flint River, through the tangled swampy bottoms and up the next hill to Twelve Oaks where Ashley lived. That was all the road meant now—a road to Ashley and the beautiful white-columned house that crowned the hill like a Greek temple.”

The Flint is only a 20-foot wide, winding stream between Fayette and Clayton counties, but this portion of it has played an integral part in literary history. Here, is where it flows along the western edge of Tara, the fictional home of Scarlett O’Hara—and perhaps the most famous home in all of American literature.

In reality, these Flint River bottomlands were part of a 2,527-acre cotton plantation owned by author Margaret Mitchell’s Irish great-grandfather, Phillip Fitzgerald. Margaret roamed the land as a child, and when she sat down to write Gone With the Wind, the Flint and her grandfather’s plantation, named Rural Home, evolved into Tara.

From The Flint River, A Recreational Guidebook to the Flint River and Environs by Fred Brown and Sherri Smith Brown