Wildwood, GA

Wildwood is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in the northeastern corner of Dade County, Georgia, close to Tennessee and the Chattanooga city limits. It lies in the diagonal valley between Sand Mountain and Lookout Mountain, a setting that makes the community's position easy to read even on a broad regional map. The valley runs through Dade County, while the state line and Chattanooga area pull Wildwood into a larger borderland geography. Dade County's own history includes a long record of rugged access and mountain roads; that older isolation helps give the Wildwood area a strong geographic identity.

ATTRDwayneP / CC BY-SA 3.0

Wildwood also carries a few unusually specific historical markers. Brock Cemetery is the burial place of George Washington Harris, a nineteenth-century Southern humorist whose writing influenced later American authors. His grave was not formally identified and marked with a monument until 2008. Across from the cemetery stands Belvedere Plantation, dating to about 1835 and counted among the oldest surviving antebellum homes in the Chattanooga area. The modern CDP remains compact, but Sand Mountain, Lookout Mountain, the cemetery, and the plantation give the place a clear set of reference points. Wildwood is a Georgia community at the edge of a state line, with mountain geography and a layered local past close at hand.