Brasstown Bald
Towns County, Towns County, Georgia
Marker Inscription
Brasstown Bald 6 Mi. The high, rounded peak, Brasstown Bald or Mt. Enotah, is the highest mountain in Georgia, 4,748 ft. Its Indian name, Itseyi, means "a place of fresh green," referring to its grassy, instead of timbered, summit. Early white settlers mistook the Indian name for a similar one meaning brass. According to Cherokee legend, there was once a great flood and all men died except a few Cherokee families who landed on top of Brasstown Bald in a giant canoe. The Great Spirit killed all the trees on top of the mountain so the survivors could plant crops and live until the floods subsided. 139-4 GEORGIA HISTORICAL COMMISSION 1956
Erected by Georgia Historical Commission
The Story
Rising 4,748 feet, Brasstown Bald is the highest point in Georgia, its bare, grassy crown giving it the Cherokee name Itseyi, 'a place of fresh green.' English-speaking settlers misheard that word and rendered it as 'brass,' the name that stuck. Cherokee tradition tells of a great flood survived by a few families who came to rest atop the mountain in a giant canoe, where the Great Spirit cleared the summit so they could plant and endure until the waters fell.
Why it matters
The peak preserves a Cherokee flood story and a telling example of how Native place-names were reshaped, and often misunderstood, by the newcomers who followed.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Long before Georgia had a name or a border, the southern Appalachians were Cherokee country — a homeland of forested ridges, river valleys, and high balds that the Cherokee people knew intimately and named with care. Brasstown Bald, rising to 4,748 feet as the highest point in the state, was one such named place, part of a landscape woven through with story and meaning.
The Cherokee called the peak Itseyi, a word meaning roughly "a place of fresh green," describing its distinctive open, grassy crown rather than a timbered summit. In a region of densely wooded mountains, a bare green top was a landmark worth naming — visible, memorable, and useful to people who navigated by the land itself.
The marker also preserves a small linguistic accident that reveals a much larger history. Early English-speaking settlers, hearing the Cherokee name, mistook it for a similar-sounding word meaning "brass" — and so the mountain became "Brasstown." The name that stuck is, in effect, a misunderstanding frozen into geography.
People & events
The heart of this marker is not an event but a story the Cherokee told about the mountain itself. According to their tradition, there was once a great flood in which nearly all people perished. A few Cherokee families survived by coming to rest on the summit of this very peak, carried there in a giant canoe.
According to the tradition recorded here, the Great Spirit then cleared the trees from the mountaintop so that the survivors could plant crops and sustain themselves until the floodwaters fell away. In that telling, the bald green summit is not just a curiosity of geography but the deliberate work of the divine — the reason people lived through the deluge, and the origin of the mountain's open crown.
Stories like this one did real work in Cherokee life. A tale that explained why a landmark looked the way it did also anchored a people to their homeland, tying identity and survival to a specific, visible place. To stand on Itseyi was to stand where, in the deep memory of the Cherokee, life itself had once begun again.
Its place in the American story
Flood traditions — stories of a great deluge survived by a chosen few — appear in cultures around the world, and the Cherokee account tied to this peak takes its place among them. What makes this one distinctive is how tightly it is bound to an actual, visible feature of the land: not an abstract myth but an explanation rooted in a mountaintop you can climb.
The marker also captures, in miniature, one of the most pervasive processes in American history: the reshaping of Native place-names by the newcomers who followed. Across the continent, Indigenous names were misheard, mistranslated, or replaced outright, and the map we use today is layered with these alterations. "Brasstown," born of a mislearned word, is a small, honest example of that vast and often careless transformation.
That the older name and its true meaning survive at all — recorded here beside the settlers' error — is itself significant. It preserves a fragment of Cherokee understanding of this land, and reminds visitors that the highest ground in Georgia carried meaning and memory long before it carried its current name.
If you visit
The marker points the way toward the peak, still some miles on, and the climb rewards the effort: from the highest point in Georgia, on a clear day the view reaches across ridgelines into neighboring states, the kind of long horizon that makes you understand why a mountain like this gathered stories.
As you look at that open, grassy summit, remember the two names it carries. Try to hold the Cherokee sense of the place — Itseyi, the place of fresh green — alongside the settlers' "Brasstown," and you're holding two different ways of seeing the same mountain, one native to it and one imported by mistake.
Brasstown Bald anchors a day of exploring the north Georgia mountains, and it's worth pausing at the marker before you head up, so you climb knowing what the peak meant to the people who named it first. The mountain is impressive on its own; knowing its story turns a scenic overlook into something closer to sacred ground.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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