Evans Mill

 We stopped at the site of Evans Mill and hiked along Pole Bridge Creek, happy to get out of the house after the ice storm.

The enormous dog insisted on playing in the white water that once turned the grist mill. Ice still covered the creek in the eddies. It was a hard freeze, but the dog, a German, is oblivious to cold.

The trail climbs a ridge, a steep drop on both sides. The forest is typical of the Piedmont — oak, hickory, sweetgum and pine. We walked a mile without seeing a beech.

The mill was just south of Lithonia, which was once the center of the quarry business around here. It’s now a town of 2,500.

From roughly 1880 to 1920, the granite business was bigger than cotton. The granite in Lithonia is like the stone found around Stone Mountain and the other monadnocks but was easier to work. Some quarry owners brought in immigrants — quarrymen from Scotland and Wales. A lot of African Americans families were also in the business.

Village historians say that if you want to know what the stone is like, look at the campus of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. A lot of it is there.