Most likely, the wall had some religious or ceremonial significance. Toting rocks and stacking them in a line is the kind of project ancient medicine men liked to think up to keep their tribesmen occupied, like building the great mounds throughout the South and down into Mexico and South America. Even today it is not hard to visualize weirdly painted warriors climbing the mountain in a torchlight procession and dancing all night around a roaring fire at the top. Consider, too, the old medicine men’s penchant for human sacrifice. At dawn the frenzied crowd probably hurled some luckless victim over the rim, while the women and children, who had waited below all night to see the poor devil fall, screamed and cheered, feeling sure that the gods would be so happy about the whole thing that they would assure bountiful crops and good hunting. Another stone wall stands atop Fort Mountain overlooking Chatsworth, a hundred miles to the northwest, and it, too, is built at the edge of a high precipice. The Stone Mountain wall must have contained millions of rocks, for there were enough to let men and boys test their muscles by rolling stones off the mountain for more than a hundred years, until Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, had the last ones thrown off in 1923 to make sure vandals did not start them rolling down among his workmen. A feature on the mountain top surely as impressive as the great wall was the Devil’s Cross Roads. This was a tremendous flat boulder roughly two hundred feet across and five to ten feet thick, cleft by two smooth, straight breaks making avenues four feet wide, one running directly north and south, the other east and west. They joined at right angles at the center, and directly over this juncture was another flat rock twenty feet in diameter. The Cross Roads became a favorite spot to have breakfast for parties who climbed the mountain to watch the sunrise. And everybody wondered that nature could make a compass as accurate and a great deal more spectacular than the ancient Egyptians could do. The entire formation disappeared in 1896 when quarrymen found that it was composed of superior building stone and broke it up and let it down the mountain by winches. DeKalb County was founded Dec. 9, 1822. The DeKalb County courthouse in Decatur burned in 1842, destroying most of the early deeds that were on record. There are some interesting legends concerning early ownership which, because of the destroyed documents, can neither be proved nor disproved. Perhaps the first white settler to claim ownership of the mountain was John W. Beauchamp. His descendants still tell how their great-great-great-grandpa gave Indians forty dollars and a pony worth about fifty dollars for the big rock. They say he traded it to Andrew Johnson and Aaron Cloud for a muzzle-loading gun and twenty dollars. There are legends that a jug of whiskey figured in both deals.