The year was 1938.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) was President. Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released to the public in the United States. The Great Depression was in its final years.

At the time, the name Cloudland Canyon was only a figment of the imagination. Before then, people knew the area as Sitton Gulch (or Gulf) or Trenton Gulf (the nearby city being Trenton, Georgia). Located at the northwest corner of Georgia, near Chattanooga, Tennessee, the area wasn’t even a park yet, rather, privately owned land.

Piece by piece, the state of Georgia began acquiring land from the private owners. Exactly when the land officially became a park, depends on who you talk to. Under FDR’s New Deal, specifically, the Civilian Conservation Corps, jobs were created for unemployed, unmarried men as a response to the Great Depression. The program provided manual labor opportunities for the development and conservation of American natural resources in rural areas owned by federal, state, and local governments.

By 1939, the first facilities and signs had been built throughout the area, and the park was officially open to the public.

Cloudland Canyon was born.

When you visit the park and are hiking the trails, you might run into some descendants of the original private owners (the Matthews, Moore, and McKaig families) who still live in the area.

Originally, Cloudland Canyon was a ruggedly handsome park consisting of an acreage of 1,924 acres (7.8 km) — roughly the equivalent of 10,236 steps, give or take. Since then, Cloudland has ballooned to 3,485 acres (14.1 km) , as new land was periodically purchased over time.

Up until 1939, the only access to the area was through Alabama or Tennessee. Georgia began work on Highway 136 which would connect U.S. 41 to the newly minted park. Access roads to Cloudland were also created by the Civilian Conservation Corps.