Smoke Rise, Georgia

Native American families certainly made campsites in this area as early as 12,000 years ago. These earliest inhabitants seem to have been nomadic in habit, traveling in groups which followed the migration patterns of game animals.

A neighborhood landmark, Stone Mountain, received its first mention in print about 1600. A Spanish explorer told the tales he heard about a mountain in Georgia, "very high, shining when the sun set like a fire." Within the next hundred years the area around the mountain was criss-crossed with trading paths which connected native settlements with the Atlantic coast and the Chattahoochee River. Many of those trails are now local highways with evocative names such as Rockbridge, which refers to an easy natural crossing site on the Yellow River. The only undisturbed path from the years of Native American inhabitation here is the footpath which goes up the west slope of Stone Mountain. Humans have taken that route for centuries and do so daily even today.

The Cherokee nation occupied the northern part of Georgia by the 17th century. This area was part of a vast woodland reserved for hunting by both Cherokees and their southern neighbors, the Creek tribes. European settlers soon began filtering up from the settled areas of the coast. Though treaties and federal policy protected the Cherokee and Creek claims to their land, various strategies were employed by the state of Georgia to open large tracts of land to white settlement. The area lay in a parcel which was ceded to the State of Georgia by the Creeks in 1821.

In December 1822, DeKalb County was incorporated from that land. The county was named for a heroic Prussian general who gave his life to America during the Revolution. The county seat, placed at the intersection of two great Native American trading paths, was named after the naval hero Stephen Decatur. The county itself was settled by a novel method designed to discourage land speculation. The new county was surveyed and divided into 202-acre (0.82 km²) lots. They were given out in a lottery for deserving veterans and other eligible citizens of Georgia. The early settlers of DeKalb tended to be farmers, mainly Scots, Irish and English families. They grew corn, cleared their own land, built sawmills and grist mills and rarely owned slaves. Their names are still found on local maps, attached to roads which wind through former fields: Rosser, McCurdy. These yeoman families gave DeKalb its first justices of the peace, doctors and ministers, as well as its soldiers in the Civil War. Armies of the North and South swept through this area in the summer of 1864 during the days of the Battle of Atlanta, fighting over the railroad lines going to the city.

After the war, the area was farmed again and the primary crop tended to be cotton. Extensive terracing on slopes in the neighborhood show where farmers a hundred years ago struggled to grow cotton on the hilly terrain. The town of Tucker began to grow where farm roads crossed the new Seaboard line. The village of Stone Mountain clustered around the extensive quarrying operations there. There are few traces in the neighborhood of these late 19th century developments, though anecdote suggests that a blacksmith's shop once stood on Silver Hill Road, near a one-room schoolhouse. The oldest home in the neighborhood, barely visible from Silver Hill, is a cottage built for the school marm. Silver Hill, one of the oldest roads in the neighborhood, makes its first appearance on a 1915 map of DeKalb County. It was a dirt road then and remained so until the late 1960s.

Cotton farming became even more of an uphill struggle with the onset of the cotton boll weevil. During the Depression, farmers left their fields for opportunities elsewhere. Several of the farms which were in the area were purchased in the late 1930s by an Atlanta attorney named Hugh Howell. The tract of land he assembled near Stone Mountain seems to have been intended for hunting and entertaining purposes. He built a country house with access to the road that would become the Stone Mountain Freeway. The road that bears his name was a later addition, a dirt track which connected Lawrenceville Highway and the village by the mountain.

Howell decided to sell his acreage for development in the late 1950s. He insisted that land be set aside for a new school, which is now Smoke Rise Elementary. An early subdivision attracted pioneer families for whom a call to Atlanta rang up a long distance charge. A single postman in a pickup truck delivered mail and the only building between the neighborhood and Tucker was the DuPont plant (which has since been replaced by the Publix shopping center). Hunting hounds whooped through the fields in autumn and a search party was once organized to find a child lost in the deep woods off Rosser Road.

The Smoke Rise name was coined by developer Bill Probst, who is responsible for many of the first homes built in the next phase of development, Smoke Rise, during the 1960s. Neighborhoods began to form up and down Hugh Howell as land changed hands. The McCurdy family's farm and hunting fields became the Forest, for example; the family name remained on the road which led through the property.

Gently resting under trees, leaves and pine needles are some of Smoke Rise’s quietest and longest term residents. There are at least three cemeteries in Smoke Rise established and nearly abandoned years ago.

The Braden Family Cemetery is the smallest of these with only four grave sites that are marked and known. The cemetery was discovered when the Ivey Oaks subdivision was in the planning stages. Mansfield Braden and Rhoda Lankford Braden (1795-1881) came to the Smoke Rise area from North Carolina about 1827. There is a monument to Rhoda and even though several records reference that her husband is also buried there, his grave is not obvious. Their two sons are buried here. Rufus Middleton Braden M.D. 1819–1862, his tomb has the inscription “ Behold the upright, for the end of that man is peace.” His brother Minor Lankford Braden (1822-1913) was a farmer and a veteran of the Mexican and Civil Wars. In 1840, he was Principal Keeper of the Penitentiary his work was primarily gathering convicts on horseback and in stage coaches. His wife, Mary Jane Milligan (1834–1909) is also buried there with an upright monument marking her grave.

Double Springs Cemetery is officially located at 5292 Rosser Rd. Originally back when Oxbow Rd. was considered to be the major road in the area, there was a church called Double Springs on Oxbow and the cemetery was behind the church. This cemetery sets well back and is accessed via a 10 foot wide piece of land between the lots of neighboring homes. The cemetery was documented in 1999 but has had very few visitors in recent times. In this cemetery most of the headstones bear the names of the Seay and Turner families who were farmers according to the 1850 census. Three graves in the cemetery are either unmarked or do not have last names. Records indicate that the Seay family came from South Carolina. John Seay (1835–1893 and Samantha (Semantha) Seay (1827–1895) according to the 1850 census had four children at that time. The Seay children who are buried here appear to have died in childhood between the ages of 2 and 17. The epitaph on one of the stones reads “An angel visited the green earth and took a flower away.” The Turners came from North Carolina and also had four children, all grew into adulthood.

The third known cemetery has a sign that was put up during a boy scout project about 10 years ago proclaiming it as the Barnett – Millican Cemetery (also known in records as the Millican Cemetery and one reference as the Barnett Cemetery. This is also perhaps the most interesting and least documented of the three. The cemetery is located on Stone Creek Dr. and accessed via several steps. There are a variety of graves in this cemetery from above the ground tombs to smaller markers and even some reported to be slave graves. There are at least 75 graves and estimates go as high as 100. The slaves were most likely treated like family to be buried with the family in this cemetery rather than separate sites.

Names you will find here include William H. Barnett (1798–1862), Nancy Millican (1800–1876), Elizabeth V. Barnett Mathews (1826 – 1877), Henry Matthews (1823–1895), H. T. Millican (1823–1850), Jas Millican (1798–1879), Laura Jane Matthews Paden (1850–1920). The Matthews clan came from South Carolina and with Elizabeth Barnett had six children. Marriages brought into the family names such as Arendall, Lankford, McWhorter, Carruth and McCullough.

The Smoke Signal News first printed in 1968 is a volunteer delivered monthly for free and available online at www.smokesignalnews.com.

Smoke Rise became a part of the City of Tucker www.tuckerga.gov/ on November 3, 2015 with a 74% approval of the voting residents. The election for the first Tucker government was held in March 1, 2016 with five Smoke Rise residents running for office. We are in District One of the city of Tucker which extends north of Smoke Rise and has two council seats.

The community has approximately 2,200 homes on 2,500 lots. Most lots are large of 1 acre or more with lots of trees. Styles range from 1950's ranches to estate homes. There is one small commercial area at the intersection of Lilburn Stone Mountain Rd and Hugh Howell Rd. In the Mountain Industrial Corridor at the intersection of Hugh Howell and Mountain Industrial Rd. development shopping, dining and retail as well as a new elementary school will change the gateway to the community.

There are four parks Smoke Rise Park, Smoke Rise Crossing, The Lord Park and Smoke Rise Bath & Racquet https://www.tuckerga.gov/departments/parks_and_recreation/index.php In addition there is a community garden http://smokerisecommunitygarden.com. You will find "little Libraries sprinkled throughout the area as well as iconic chimneys on many corners with the most prominent being at the intersection of Hugh Howell Rd and Rosser Rd.