Each day cars whiz by a nondescript pile of stone north of Dahlonega, occasionally slowing to see a tourist taking a picture. The rocks are the grave of a Cherokee who loved the forest and called the mountains of North Georgia home. Trahlyta, according to legend, lived on a mountain near her grave. She was told to walk along a path, drink from a spring and wish never to grow old by the "Mountain Medicine Man" or the Witch of Cedar Mountain, depending on whose story you believe. "You will become more beautiful with each sip" the voice told her. She followed the path and drank from the spring. Word of her beauty quickly spread.

The Cherokee warrior Wahsega, whom she rejected as a suitor, kidnapped and took her to his home. She begged and pleaded for her release, but Wahsega would not permit it. With each day her strength waned, her happiness gone, longing for her mountain forest. As she lay dying Trahlyta asked to be buried in the mountain paradise from which she had come. "Strangers, as they pass by, may drop a stone on my grave and they too shall be young and happy, as I once was," she said, "What they wish for shall be theirs!."

Cherokee, and later whites, would pick up a nearby stone and add it to her grave for good luck. Today her grave is in Stonepile Gap, the water she drank is called Porter Springs, and the hill is Cedar Mountain.

Twice men have attempted to move the grave during road construction. Both times at least one person died in an accident while moving the pile. The stone grave remains today in the same place it has always been. Porter Springs, in the latter half of the 19th Century became a stopping point for those seeking the water that Trahlyta had sipped to become eternally young.

Location: North of Dahlonega at the intersection of U. S. 19 and S. R. 60
Directions: Take Highway 19 north from Dahlonega to the junction of State Road 60. The stone pile is in a triangle at the intersection.
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Date added: November 16, 2003
Last update: December 6, 2003