Odes to Toco Hills · Track 2 · middle

Pre-Colonial Paths Through North Decatur

Pre-colonial — the Mvskoke (Creek) seasonal paths through what would become northeast DeKalb, the South Fork of Peachtree Creek that runs through the neighborhood, the trade routes the surveyors followed. Dr.Pope reads the watershed.

Lyrics

[Intro]
Before the plat, before the name Toco.
Before the developer’s curb.
There is only the watershed.
The South Fork of Peachtree Creek, finding its level.

[Verse 1]
The Mvskoke path was seasonal. A line of convenience, not of law.
Worn into the red clay by moccasins, following the high ground above the floodplain.
A path from the river to the hunting grounds, between the 1790s and the last treaty.
No signs. No deeds.
Just the memory of the soil, holding the shape of passage.

[Chorus]
The creek doesn't read the DeKalb County plats from 1822.
It remembers the tannin stain of fallen oak leaves, the weight of deer crossing at the shallows near Frazier Road.
It flows under LaVista now, in a concrete channel.
But the water is the same water. The archive that can't be burned.

[Verse 2]
Then the surveyors came. After the Treaty of Indian Springs, 1821.
With their chains and their compasses, they followed the easiest routes.
The old paths. The ones already there.
They drew straight lines over the land's contours.
They gave the streams English names.
And they noted, in their ledgers, the timber and the quality of the soil for farming.

[Bridge]
One field note mentions a marker tree. A black walnut grove, by the creek bend.
Used by the Mvskoke, the surveyor writes.
It’s absent from every later map.
Right where the Kroger loading dock is today.
The Treaty of Washington, 1825, erased the people.
The maps erased their landmarks.
We have the signatures. We don't have the names of the women who gathered nuts from that grove.

[Outro]
The water runs cool over the gravel bed behind the shopping center.
It carries the same silt it carried then.
It doesn’t know our names.
It never did.