Cullasaja: The Gorge the Cherokee Named for Honey Locusts

The name Cullasaja comes from the Cherokee word Kulsetsiyi, meaning the place of the honey locusts. It was the name of a Cherokee village that once stood downstream from the falls, and the river that ran through it carried the name forward long after the village was gone.

The Cullasaja River drains a high basin in the Southern Blue Ridge, dropping from the plateau above Highlands toward the valley town of Franklin in a gorge that compresses four miles of road into scenery that feels almost theatrical. The walls close in, the river accelerates, and the waterfalls arrive: Dry Falls first, where US Route Sixty-Four actually passes behind the cascade so a driver can briefly watch water fall in front of the windshield. Then Bridal Veil Falls on a side tributary. Then, at the gorge's narrowest, Cullasaja Falls itself, a thundering plunge of roughly two hundred to two hundred and fifty feet that the road looks almost directly down upon.

The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto followed a route through this general corridor in fifteen forty, more than four decades before English colonists reached the Carolina coast. The Cherokee who guided him and those who came after knew every fold and waterfall of the gorge intimately. Their removal under the Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty would eventually clear this highland country of most of its native population, though the Eastern Band of Cherokee people remain in the region today.

The road through the gorge was not completed until nineteen twenty-nine, carved from sheer cliff faces in places where there was barely room for two vehicles to pass. The Franklin Press declared it at the time probably the greatest scenic highway in all the state.

The Nantahala National Forest protects the corridor today. The honey locust trees are still there.