Plant Fossils from the Durham Mines, Walker County, Georgia
Contributed by Jose Santamaria, Executive Director at Tellus Science Museum

Atop Lookout Mountain in Northwest Georgia is a 1,000-acre tract once mined for coal. Known as the Durham mines, it is also one of the best places in Georgia to collect plant fossils from the Pennsylvanian period, which dates back to approximately 320 to 300 million years ago. Although most of the land is now state or privately owned, one section owned by the Lula Lake Land Trust is open to fossil collecting with advance permission. I have collected there more than 40 times over the years and many of my best finds are now in the collection of Tellus Science Museum.

The area was once a coastal swamp forest populated by the giant ancestors of ferns, seed ferns, club mosses and horsetails. As these plants died, they accumulated in the stagnant waters of the swamp bottom but did not fully decay because the water was too acidic and low in oxygen to support bacteria. Periodic flooding covered this organic material, called peat, with sediments. The waters would then recede, and the forest would flourish once again. This process happened over and over for millions of years, only ceasing when the land was uplifted into the Appalachian Mountains of today. Gradual compaction and heat eventually transformed the peat into layers of coal while the sediments hardened into layers of shale and sandstone. This process formed the vast Appalachian coal beds that stretch from Alabama into Pennsylvania, including the Durham mines area.

Records of mining at Durham date back to 1891, but mining for coal may have begun before the Civil War. The town, originally called Pittsburgh, changed its name to Durham when the Durham Iron and Coal Company took over operations. Mining was conducted mostly underground with convict labor leased from the state, the majority of whom were African Americans. A rail line was built from Durham down the mountain to Chickamauga, where ovens refined the coal into coke. This coal product, which burned longer and at a higher temperature than unprocessed coal, was shipped north to the iron furnaces in Chattanooga. Large-scale mining ended at Durham in the 1940s, although mining briefly returned to the area in the 1970s. The roadway going into the property is part of the old rail line, and you can still find rusty rail spikes when looking for fossils.

During mining, the shale and sandstone were separated from the coal and piled into dumps. Today, these dumps remain as ridges throughout the Lula Lake Land Trust property. These are the best places to collect. You will not find much in the sandstone, but the shale can reveal delicately preserved fossils when you split it. Leaf clusters of seed ferns such as Mariopteris, Neuropteris, and Sphenopteris in particular are especially abundant and make attractive specimens. If you are lucky, you may encounter impressions of the Lepidodendron, a giant lycopod whose tree trunk resembles tire tracks. 
 
There is plenty of material in the dumps of the Durham mines at the Lula Lake Land Trust. Fossils are relatively easy to collect, and the site can provide years of educational fossil collecting for everyone.

DID YOU KNOW? Durham is the newly acquired 486 acres by Lula Lake Land Trust (LLLT). This area on Lookout Mountain was previously used to provide progress after the Industrial Revolution. It was abandoned after the mining resources were exhausted. Now healed from its previous use, it is now a flourishing ecosystem. LLLT is in the process of building trails for daily recreational use with 11 miles already completed. 

Long before our organization became Lula Lake Land Trust (LLLT), the corner of Lookout Mountain made famous by Lula Lake and Lula Falls was not very beautiful. Mining, dumped garbage, and timber harvests had ravaged the land. In 1958, our founders Robert and Helen Davenport began restoring the denuded beauty and richness back to the landscape until LLLT was formed in 1994. Could you imagine what the lands surrounding Lula Lake and Lula Falls would look like today without conservation work and crucial donor support? Thankfully, donors are the reason why our community will only know the story of this “gem of Lookout Mountain” in its preserved natural state.
 
The restoration of what is now known as Lula Lake marked the rewriting of history. Car tires, broken bottles, and bags of litter were removed to make room for a new story—our story. The story of Lula Lake continues to grow because of donors. They are the reason why hikers can escape reality and slip into nature, and they are to thank for the decades of memories made and a lifetime of memories awaiting future generations. The garbage dump of the past will never tarnish our watershed again because they chose to support our organization.
 
Conservation works best when we work together. If you would like to help us keep adding more chapters to our conservation story, please consider supporting our nonprofit organization with a donation. You can donate online or by mail at LLLT, PO BOX 395, Lookout Mountain, TN 37350. Please don’t hesitate to contact our Director of Development, Matthew, at matthew@lulalake.org if you have any additional questions.