Forrest Drive

One of Pine Lake's roads is named Forrest-- but after whom, or for what?

Were the name Forest, with one R, it would fit with the themed tree names of the streets on the south side of the lake: Spruce, Pine, Oak, Magnolia, Hemlock, Dogwood. But it has two Rs, so unless it was misspelled seventy-five years ago it was most likely named after Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest.

As a military leader, Forrest was brilliant, but his reputation is stained-- first by what many historians consider a massacre of black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, in Tennessee-- and second by his role in the formation of the Ku Klux Klan and in particular his instigation of and participation in "midnight parades, ‘ghost’ masquerades, and ‘whipping’ and even ‘killing Negro voters and white Republicans, to scare blacks off voting and running for office." *

Throughout the South schools, parks, assorted monuments, a city in Arkansas, and even a national forest were named for Forrest, a tradition that continued well into the twentieth century. 

So is Pine Lake's Forrest Road named in honor of Nathan Bedford Forest? I'm not sure there's a definitive answer, but certainly there seems to be no place or other person of that name who would remotely qualify for the honor of a street-naming in a tiny town in north Georgia in the mid 1930s.

I'm not saying one of our streets is definitely named after Nathan Bedford Forrest or suggesting the name be changed. I'm just saying the road was most likely named in Forrest's honor.


* Andrew Ward, River Run Red: The Fort Pillow Massacre in the American Civil War (New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 386.