The beginnings of Jasper, the Woodbridge inn, and the hospitality industry in Northwest Georgia go back to 1805. In that year, the State of Georgia expended $5,000 surveying a route from what is now Flowery Branch in Hall County, GA, through the Cherokee Nation to the Tennessee state line. Eventually this trail went on to Nashville, Tennessee. The Federal Road was negotiated by Federal treaty (hence, the name) but surveyed by the states of Georgia and Tennessee, and maintained by the Cherokees.
More of it is found in Pickens County than any other county and, in the form of Chambers Street, it today passes in front of the Woodbridge Inn. The Federal Road was the single most important passage through the old Cherokee Nation. Although it was little more than a path, it was carefully surveyed along the ridge tops to prevent flood damage and was thus one of the first true state highways in Georgia. Much of it, in the form of eroded gulleys and wagon ruts, can still be seen today. It was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of largely uninhabited acres, wherein wolves, panthers, rattlesnakes, bears, bandits, and sometimes hostile Indians roamed. Because of the dangers, travelers seldom left the Federal Road. Often, they brought with them herds of turkeys, ducks, geese, hogs, and cattle. A highway of history, among its users were President James Monroe; General Andrew Jackson in 1818 (hence, the origin of the legend that the road was created by Jackson's troops in 1819; his troops actually reached Georgia by another route); and all of the major players in the last days of the Cherokee Nation in Georgia. To serve these travelers, inns (called taverns) were operated by the Cherokees and their mixed blood relations.
One of the last of these taverns was the Charles H. Nelson Tavern (the Trippe-Simmons-
Nelson House), a few miles north of Jasper on the Federal Road. Ten miles south of Jasper, by way of the Federal Road, in what is now Tate, was the tavern operated by Cherokee Judge James Daniel (ruins of the chimneys are still visible) and the tavern of Burke County,
Georgia born Ambrose Harnage and his Cherokee wife (on the site of the pink marble Tate
House, now on the National Register of Historic places). No tavern or significant Cherokee
settlement existed where Jasper is today.
In 1829, Georgia extended its laws over the Cherokee Nation. Three years later, the Cherokee Nation in Georgia was surveyed in lots, districts, and sections for the purpose of granting these lands to white Georgia citizens by means of lottery. Where Jasper and the Woodbridge Inn would be built was land lot 306, 12th District, 2nd Section. It was won by Samuel Darnall (no relation to the present Darnell family of Pickens County) of Jasper County, on an extra chance given him in the 1832 Cherokee Land Lottery for his service in the Indian Wars of the 1790s. Darnall was granted the land lot on July 1, 1843.
The Cherokees were removed in 1838. However, Northwest Georgia was slow to be settled.
Although Georgia citizens won the territory's land lots in the 1832 lotteries, most of the winners sold their lots to land speculators, some of whom acquired vast, undeveloped, acreage. The families that did settle in the region were largely from other states and bought their lands from the speculators.
Initially, Northwest Georgia was officially one county called Cherokee, created December 21, 1830. This county functioned only in 1832, using the previously mentioned Harnage tavern in what is now Tate as a courthouse. On December 3, 1832, this original Cherokee County was divided into nine counties including today’s Cherokee and Gilmer counties, from which, on December 5, 1853, the Georgia legislature created Pickens County. The Inferior Court (the modern equivalent of a board of county commissioners) had the responsibility of selecting the site of the county seat for the new county. They passed over the established settlements of Saunderstown (now Talking Rock) and Harnageville (now Tate) to chose instead a location at almost the geographic center of the new county, the previously mentioned land lot 306-12-2, which was bisected by the Federal Road, still the area's major transportation artery. The site had dramatic natural beauty, a ridge surrounded on almost all sides by mountain vistas.
The Inferior Court of Pickens County initially purchased thirty-six acres of the land lot for $400 from Perry West of Spartanburg District, SC on August 7, 1855.
Samuel and Nancy Darnall, then of Newton County, had sold it to Benjamin Darnall on August
11, 1846 for ninety dollars. Benjamin sold the lot to West on November 11, 1851 for the same
amount.
Since the Indian removal of 1838, some settlement had taken place on and near what is now
Jasper. James Simmons had lived in the area since 1835 and had traded with the Indians. He
acquired the Trippe-Simmons-Nelson House and operated it as an inn, store, and post office
known as Marblehead. It was the Marblehead Post Office from July 5, 1850 to June 3, 1854,
when it was renamed the Jasper Post Office. (The Trippe-Simmons-Nelson House had also been the Talking Rock Post Office from January 18, 1832 to July 15, 1833. However, it has never been in the city limits of either Talking Rock or Jasper.)
His store account book, on microfilm at the Georgia Department of Archives and History, shows that he did extensive business. Oral tradition claims that a Baptist church stood near the Norton Cemetery on the east side of modern Jasper. The story goes that the church, founded in the 1840s, abandoned the Norton Cemetery and moved into Jasper to become the present Jasper First Baptist Church. The first session of the Pickens County court was at a meeting house in what is now Jasper.
What is the town cemetery of Jasper, near the high school, dates from the 1840s and was a
family cemetery before Jasper was created. Simmons suggested Mt. Vernon as a name for the new town but the choice went to Lemuel Allred, the Cherokee County politician most
responsible for creating the new county. He recommended “Jasper” after South Carolina
Revolutionary War hero Sergeant William Jasper.
The site of the later Woodbridge Inn is in the same land lot but was not part of the original thirty-six acres of Jasper. Hayden Turner and his family were living on the later site of the Woodbridge Inn in 1855, just as Jasper was being organized.
In 1871 and 1872. R. Holt paid the taxes for the ca. 120 acres in the land lot but that was not in Jasper. W. T. Day, a prominent Jasper attorney, paid the taxes from 1873 through 1876, although he did not purchase the property from Perry West until December 19, 1874.
Alanson E. Davis, a non-resident, paid taxes on seventeen acres Of this tract in 1876 and 1877. A William M. Davis, relationship if any to Alanson unknown, sold his seventeen acres to Edmond Lenning on June 4, 1877.
Ed Lenning, the first owner and builder of the Woodbridge Inn, is something of an enigma. He
was born on September 1, 1833, in Tennessee or, according to his death certificate on September 1, 1822, in Hall County, Georgia. Luke E. Tate in The History of Pickens County wrote that Lenning was in the California Gold Rush of 1849 and before leaving home Ed Lenning had made the statement that he was going out there and make ten thousand dollars in gold, then come back to the red hills of Georgia, marry, and not work any more. He kept his word all the way through.
Tate added that Lenning was gone for a long time and his son would write of his father
mentioning the Chinese in San Francisco. The earliest record now found of Edmond Lenning is the 1877 Pickens County tax digest, wherein he was shown as owning no property. The
R. G. Dun credit reports show him opening a store in Waleska in neighboring Cherokee County, Georgia, and another in Ludville in Pickens County in 1878. He was the son of the widow Elizabeth Lenning/Lanning (c 1800-1879, born South Carolina), who is recorded
in the 1850 census of Cherokee County and the 1860 and 1870 censuses of Pickens County, He erected a tombstone to her in the Jasper town cemetery. Ed Lenning would become a successful businessman and, in 1885, mayor of Jasper.
Edmond E. Lenning's small farm of seventeen acres was just outside of Jasper and well-chosen both in time and location. Incorporated by act of the Georgia legislature on December 14, 1857, the county seat of Pickens County had, up until that time, been little more than what Robert Riley Berry found in 1867: Jasper is a small town and the county site of Pickens County. It is situated in a little poor elevation containing three or four brick houses (one of which is the Court House) and a few stores and liquor shop. Complaints by the county grand jury about the quality of bricks used in the courthouse supports Berry's description.
In 1937, a Mrs. J. N. Anderson gave an interview of her life as a teenager in the formative years of Jasper. She told of how the town had no brick buildings. The courthouse and Baptist church were wood frame structures while the Methodists met in a log chapel. Beneath a grove on the courthouse lawn, people would gather around a public well. The problem with her account has been that her father Hayden Turner does not appear in federal censuses of 1850, 1860, or 1870 of Georgia, or apparently anywhere else. The R. G. Dun credit reports, however, mentions a Turner & Co. in Jasper in January 1860 as out of business and the proprietor as having left the country.
Using this information with the county marriages and a memoir of another citizen in the 1934
County history reveals that the 1937 interview came from Sarah Elizabeth Turner (later Mrs.
John N. J. Anderson), shown in the 1860 census as living next door to her grandfather Middleton Turner. Her father Hayden likely had left before the taking of the 1860 census.
Times changed just after Lenning bought his farm. The Marietta and North Georgia Railroad
reached Jasper in 1883. The right of way wiped out whole blocks of the town and caused a major reorganization of Jasper's few streets, almost creating a new town. The Lenning property adjoined the Federal Road, which was still the major thoroughfare for Jasper until after World War II. The new railroad also passed in front of Lenning's property and the train station was directly across the tracks (after this station burned in 1905 a new depot was built behind the courthouse and is still standing). In 1883, Jasper expanded the town limits to include Lenning's property, which he subdivided into smaller lots.
On March 5, 1883, Edmond Lenning gave a right of way to the railroad and began construction of what is now the oldest section of the Woodbridge Inn. It is shown on the plat of the right of way. His property, when he purchased it, contained a two-room log cabin with a dog trot between the rooms, similar to the original Kirby cabin and other cabins in the area.
Lenning had his cabin demolished and replaced with a two-story building of heart pine and some oak that he finished in 1884. Each of the two floors had four rooms and a hall. On the rear of the building (it faces south, what is now Chambers Street), a kitchen was added that gave the building an L shape.
A visitor to Jasper in 1884 wrote of Mrs. Lenning and staying at the hotel. Until the late 1930s,
the building was little changed, as shown by the 1924 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Jasper.
Ed Lenning's Lenning House was not a hotel but a residence for his small farm. Although he had only seventeen acres, his farm in 1880 included five cattle (including two milch cows), thirteen swine, and eight chickens. The fields produced 100 bushels of Indian corn, thirty bushels of oats, forty bushels of wheat, and thirty bushels of potatoes. His fifty fruit trees produced 100 bushels of peaches in 1880.
However, he also operated what would now be termed a restaurant and did take in boarders. Each room in his boarding house had a fireplace.
Edmond E. Lenning died July 16, 1919, and was buried in the Jasper Town Cemetery. His wife
had preceded him to the grave by a few months. In his will, Lenning left the boarding house
House to his two widowed daughters, Mrs. Victoria Wofford and Mrs. Edna Byers Low. They
would sell the property to their brother, James.
James E. Lenning had served from Pickens County in World War I. Suffering from heart
problems and arthritis, he moved to Miami, Florida after the war, where he worked in real estate and his wife, the former Mary Cox, was a bookkeeper. When his health deteriorated to the point that he was a semi-invalid in the late 1930s, they moved back to Jasper. By that time, his sisters who owned the Lenning House had moved from Jasper and the building was all but abandoned.
James Lenning and his other sister Ida Cartwright borrowed money and bought the Lenning
House on February 4, 1937. By February 6, 1940, he was able to secure another mortgage with which to exercise his option and buy out Ida. James added eight rooms (four on each floor) to the rear of the building, including the large dining room. Bathrooms and electricity were installed, windows replaced, and the porch extended. He added a cream-colored siding to the building to protect the exterior.
(In later years, he replaced this siding with imitation gray brick siding.) Spring mattresses were
used on the beds and insulation was put in the walls. Lenning's wife Mary actually operated
what was now the Lenning Hotel, which she continued to do after his death on March 21, 1942
and until her death on February 9, 1950. Having no children, she willed the hotel property to her sister Ora Cox Little and nephew Charles Little, with the stipulation that the hotel be known as the Jasper Hotel, since no Lenning would be living there. Ora Little operated the Jasper Hotel as a hotel and restaurant until 1970 when state legal requirements for a hotel compelled her to return the building to a boarding house.
(Even when operated as a hotel, however, there had always been some permanent boarders.) Her restaurant was open for three meals a day, Monday through Friday, and all but the evening meal on Saturday and Sunday. A basic menu of meats and vegetables was maintained at a price of $1.50 (later $2.50) per meal.
Her restaurant drew customers from Atlanta, Chattanooga, and Gainesville. She added the large windows in the dining room that still today look out over the mountains. Her cooking was featured in the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine in June 1957.
Charles Little and Hilda Little Chadwick sold their interests in the business to Ora Little on
November 9, 1970.
The following year, on April 21, 1971, Ora Little sold the property to William and Salley Cizmarc, beginning a succession of owners in a relatively few years. Each new owner took out
proportionately larger loans to pay off in the purchase price what was owed by the previous
owners. The Cizmarcs sold the 2.136 acres upon which the Woodbridge Inn stands to Michael
and Elaine Conan on July 9, 1973.
The Conans, in turn, sold the same property to Leopold and Helen Frank on July 13, 1976. They only held the property until December 27, 1976, when they sold it to Jochem and Brenda S. Rueffert.
Jochem Joe Rueffert was a German-born French chief. He was working in Atlanta when he saw the potential for reviving the old Jasper Hotel as a restaurant. However, he had serious doubts about the money needed to restore the building and the business that fallen off. He still had these doubts after the purchase. For several months, he and his family were the only employees and he remembers that they constantly work harder, only to lose more money every week. They did succeed and have become profitable, with a clientele coming from Atlanta and far beyond for Joe's French country cuisine. The restaurant has been praised in several newspapers and magazines across Georgia as well as on television's PM Magazine. With profits from the restaurant, the Ruefferts have replaced the roof and several windows, added a rear deck, and reversed the building’s general deterioration. The outside siding replaces various sidings used on the building since the late 1930s. A separate building has been built to restore the Woodbridge Inn to its former status of a hotel.
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