Odes to Avondale Estates · Track 2 · middle

Pre-Colonial Paths Through Ingleside

Pre-colonial — the Mvskoke (Creek) paths through what was first called Ingleside, the natural springs that fed what would become Lake Avondale, the seasonal hunting grounds before the surveyors arrived. The land's memory under the Tudor overlay. Dr.Pope reads the ridgeline.

Lyrics

[Intro]
They call this Lake Avondale.
A civic heart. Twelve acres, engineered.
But you start with the water.
You always start with what fed it.

[Verse 1]
Before the dam, before the swans, before the name Ingleside...
there were the limestone spring heads.
The seeps.
The sound was just water over moss-covered rock.
The air in July was pine resin and wet clay.
The only clock was the cicada's thrum.
This ground remembers a different humidity.
A different quiet.
Before George Francis Willis and his candy money.
Before the 1821 Treaty of Indian Springs drew its neat, final line.

[Chorus]
You read the ridgeline, not the roofline.
You follow the deer path under Clarendon Avenue's asphalt.
You listen for the ghost-stream under the manicured lawn.
This is the work.
To see the hunting ground that haunts the Tudor grid.
To read the land's first draft, written in water and shadow.

[Verse 2]
This contour, here... this is Avondale Road now.
It was a game trail first. East-west. Followed the high ground.
The path of least resistance for the hunter, and the hunted.
Under your feet, the memory of crushed sassafras root.
Turkey-foot grass.
From the high point where they later put the one-room school,
you could see for miles.
A lookout. Not a postcard view.

[Chorus]
You read the ridgeline, not the roofline.
You follow the deer path under Clarendon Avenue's asphalt.
You listen for the ghost-stream under the manicured lawn.
This is the work.
To see the hunting ground that haunts the Tudor grid.
To read the land's first draft, written in water and shadow.

[Bridge]
The DeKalb County tax digest mentions it just once.
A single line item on a forgotten parcel.
"One broken stone mortar still in ground."
That is all.
No name for the Mvskoke woman who used it.
No record of the children playing by the springs.
The archive is a monument to its own omissions.
Their names are an erased memory. A deliberate quiet.

[Outro]
The springs still feed the lake.
The water doesn't know it's been named.
It just rises.
Under the half-timbered gables, under the English dream,
the water still rises.
The first draft is never truly gone.
Just harder to read.