Once a center of the renowned northeast Georgia moonshine business, the railroad town of Cornelia has found new ways to flourish.
Photo Above: Street art is ubiquitous in Cornelia.
Photos Courtesy of Joan Vannorsdall.
You can’t not pay attention to it, the 5,200-pound apple outside the Cornelia Depot Railroad Museum. Seven feet high and 22 feet around, the apple sits on an eight-foot pedestal and shines bright.
Molded in Winchester, Virginia (the Apple Capital of the World), the apple came by rail in 1925 to Cornelia, courtesy of the Southern Railway.
Why, I ask Cornelia Main Street Manager Noah Hamil, is his town known as the Home of the Big Red Apple, with the annual Big Red Apple Festival its largest event? “Apples and peaches were our big crops here in the early 20th century. After World War II, that changed.”
Still, Cornelia celebrates its trains and apples, and both dominate the heart-center of downtown. In 1872, passenger and freight rail service came to town, followed 10 years later by the shortline Tallulah Falls Railway.
Today, the Norfolk Southern trains run long and often through the center of Cornelia, rattling the windows of the Depot Museum. Inside you’ll see the announcement of the October 20, 1992 Cornelia arrival of President George W. Bush on his Whistle Stop Train Tour. The museum walls are lined with railroad art, old photographs and early 20th-century railroad memorabilia.
This little museum is home to one of only two train circuit boards in America—the other in storage at the Smithsonian. It’s massive, and looks impossibly complex, and if you’re there when a museum guide is present, you might get to sit and play with the hundreds of switches that used to shift trains from one track to another.
Walk across the train tracks, up the stairs and over a few blocks, and you’ll find the Everything Elvis Museum, tucked on the third floor of the 1908 Loudermilk Boarding House and reportedly listed in Guinness World Records to be the largest collection of Elvis paraphernalia in the world.
And down the street, a beautiful but puzzling wall mural: a railroad underpass, mountains beyond it, framed by these words: “CORNELIA LOVES TIM LOVES TINK.”
The obvious questions: Who’s Tim? Who’s Tink? And why does Cornelia love them?
The urban legend goes something like this. It was sometime in the ‘50s…or was it the ‘60s? Or maybe the ‘70s. Someone spray-painted “Tim Loves Tink” on the railroad underpass going out of town. It got removed…and painted again. And again. No one knew who was behind it…or at least they weren’t talking. As soon as the love declaration was removed, a new one appeared.
Eventually, the town gave in, painting the phrase on the underpass: permanent graffiti.
And now a massive “Cornelia loves Tim loves Tink” mural on a downtown building, forever marrying Tim, Tink and the City of Cornelia in beautiful colors for all to see.
A massive, gifted red apple. The only intact historic train circuit board in America. The largest Elvis collection in the world. A mysterious love note. All in Cornelia’s walkable downtown, where restaurants and bakeries are blooming like flowers after spring rain.
A town of fewer than 6,000 people…with a steakhouse restaurant like the Community Brew & Tap in the restored 1900 Community Bank and Trust building, that draws diners from Atlanta with its wood-fired grill and speakeasy décor. An outdoor bar area with a vintage diner and soon-to-be-opened Italian restaurant in a former downtown drugstore nearby. Three bakeries. A coffee shop. The list goes on. “Cornelia is the restaurant capital of Habersham County,” says Hamil.
How does this happen?
Jessie Owensby is the Community Development Director of Cornelia. “When I started here in late 2015, the downtown was completely empty,” she says. “One of the city commissioners told me it was my job to fill it!”
Owensby reached out to the Carl Vinson Institute of Government at the University of Georgia, and initiated a 12-week Georgia Downtown Renaissance fellowship project. The result was a stunning 70-page catalogue filled with renderings of what downtown Cornelia could do to restore business vitality.
Some of the proposed improvements are already underway. Things like the Cornelia Rails to Trails project. An amphitheater next door to the depot, where performances and festivals will bring people downtown. An infill housing development along a greenway, downtown-walkable. (Cornelia’s population swelled by 5% between 2020 and 2024, and housing is at a premium.) A sidewalk extension to connect the downtown to the Cornelia City Park.
“Our median age in Cornelia is 30—and more than 75% of our population is under 62,” Owensby says. “We have a lot of young families here, and we’re working on ways to keep them grounded and happy here.”
“We’re termed a ‘microcity,’ which means that we’re a rural city serving as a regional hub. We want the growth in the city—and we want to keep the country rural. Cornelia is the best of both worlds. We can be out of civilization in five minutes—our goal is to keep it that way,” she says.
Sitting in the center of the Northeast Georgia Mountain Region, and with focused city staff working creatively to celebrate its quirky past as it moves forward, Cornelia has its stories to share.
“This is home,” says Jessie Owensby. “The kids come back to live here. I absolutely love this city.”
High Up in Habersham: Chenocetah Fire Tower and Tallulah Gorge State Park
High above Cornelia, on top of Chenocetah Mountain, sits the only granite fire tower in America, and one of only two fire towers left in Georgia. Built by the Works Progress Administration in 1937, the 54-foot tower affords stunning views of Lake Russell and the Chattahoochee National Forest. It’s open Saturdays April through October and during festival weekends. And 17 miles up the road, on the border of Habersham and Rabun Counties, Tallulah Gorge State Park is a waterfall-hiker’s paradise, “The Niagara of the South” offers spectacular views of the Tallulah River, the two-mile-long, 1,000-foot-deep gorge and five waterfalls. Trails run along both rims of the canyon. Both the Fire Tower and Tallulah Gorge are proof positive that on a clear day, you can see forever in Habersham County, Georgia.
The story above first appeared in our November / December 2024 issue.
