If Beauchamp received or gave a bill of sale, it has not come to light in recent years. He never explained how the Indians got their claim to the property. It may have been a sudden inspiration, conjured up at sight of the jug. No formal deed could have been available, since the whole area was still in public domain. In 1822, the year Francis Goulding explored the mountain, the State Legislature prepared the original land grants. The mountain lay in seven different land lots, which apparently were awarded to veterans of the Revolutionary War. One lot went to the orphans of a veteran. It is said that a man in Athens was awarded one of the grants. He walked the sixty miles or so to the mountain to examine his property, and seeing that most of it was bare rock, he swapped it for a mule to ride home. Andrew Johnson, who already had a shotgun claim to the mountain, was not one of those receiving grants, but he acquired bona fide title to considerable land at the base and also the main slice of the mountain in time to build an inn, about where the Administration Building is now, when the stage coach line came through in 1825. The stage ran from the capital at Milledgeville by Eatonton and Covington to Stone Mountain, then on by Winder to Athens where the oldest chartered State University was already dispensing higher education. Discovery of gold in the Dahlonega and Gainesville area in 1828, the first deposits found north of Mexico, brought a boom in traffic and another stage line from Stone Mountain to the gold fields. Fare was ten cents a mile, and since distances were great, the business must have been profitable. Everybody bent on mining gold had to pass Stone Mountain, and any coming back, with or without new riches, stopped there again. Aaron Cloud, Johnson’s partner in the shotgun deal, built another inn to take care of the overflow. A town calling itself New Gibraltar grew up around the taverns, with general stores, a blacksmith shop and other services for the traveling public and the growing farm population. In that era of typhoid, chronic malaria and yellow fever epidemics, prosperous planters and merchants in the lowlands sent their families to the mountains during the “summer miasmas”—the fly and mosquito seasons we realize now—and the most enjoyable part of the trip each way was the stopover of a day or two at Stone Mountain to climb the great rock and unlimber kinks caused by days of rough bouncing in stagecoach or carriage. Aaron Cloud was the first to establish a tourist attraction. In 1838 he paid Andrew Johnson $100 for “150 feet square” at the highest point on the mountain, where he erected a tower 165 feet tall, appropriately called Cloud’s Tower. For fifty cents a visitor who already had winded himself reaching the summit could climb another 300 steps and get a still higher view. William C. Richards, a correspondent for “Georgia Illustrated,” published in Macon, wrote in 1842: