Look sharp: This Dixie Highway border crossing is marked on the GA side by a small green road sign and on the TN side by a tall eye-catching sign, a point of interest in an otherwise nondescript area of older 1920s-1930s American Commercial style buildings.
This TN-GA border crossing is on the "Battlefield Route" of the western division of the Dixie Highway, so named because of the number of battlefields this alignment of the Dixie Highway passes.
In the local area, US 27 between Chattanooga TN and Rome GA passes two famed Civil War battle sites in the local area: Missionary Ridge and Chickamauga.
This segment of US 27 in Rossville follows the Old Federal Road, an early road in Northwest GA opened by treaty with the Cherokee Indians in 1805: (
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"From Cloud Springs Road, one should turn northwest (right) on Highway 27 to Rossville to visit the last Georgia site on the Old Federal Road. Chief John Ross was the Cherokee chief who worked hard to resist the forced resettlement of the Cherokees to Oklahoma. The John Ross House was on the Federal Road but has been moved to a poorly marked location just south of Highway 27. Turn left at Spring Street and go just behind a large supermarket. Park across the street from the John Ross House, next to a duck pond.
The traveler should return to Highway 27, going north through Rossville to the Tennessee border and Chattanooga. One of the ironies of the Federal Road is that past Chief John Ross’s house, through Rossville, is Ross’s Landing, the original name of Chattanooga. At Ross’s Landing, many roads converged to the most organized point for American Indians to gather or be forced together to move west on the Trail of Tears. This end of the Georgia section of the Federal Road is again on the outskirts of a city, but unlike the section north of Atlanta that runs through new suburban development, here just south of Chattanooga one goes through older businesses and 20th century buildings that have had many uses – and some have seen better days. This allows the traveler to see a different side of the urban South."
From the Encyclopedia of Georgia: (
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"The Dixie Highway, a network of roads connecting Canada to Florida in the early decades of the twentieth century, was an ambitious undertaking to build the nation's first north–south paved interstate highway. . . .
Launching of the Dixie Highway
On April 3, 1915, Georgia governor John M. Slaton and his counterparts (or their representatives) from five other states met in Chattanooga, Tennessee, for the inaugural meeting of the Dixie Highway Association (DHA). . . .
...[T]he Dixie Highway became a network with Sault Ste. Marie on the Canadian border as the northern terminus. From there, the highway extended southward through upper Michigan and then via ferry to Mackinaw, where the highway split into a Western Division that included Chicago and an Eastern Division that included Detroit. Following roughly parallel paths southward, the two divisions reunited at Chattanooga.
Envisioning an influx of tourists, different cities and counties competed to be part of the Dixie Highway. In Georgia, rivalries became intense—especially between Rome and Dalton, each sending hundreds of supporters to the DHA's initial meeting to argue the merits for including their city on the route. Dalton not only offered the shortest route from Chattanooga to Atlanta but also boasted that it was the "Battlefield Route" associated with Union general William T. Sherman's Atlanta Campaign, which would attract Civil War tourism. Rome made a persuasive case that it had a larger population base and could build its portion more quickly than Dalton.
As a compromise, the DHA approved two routes south from Chattanooga—one through Dalton and one through Rome—with both routes converging near Cartersville, where they rejoined the Dixie Highway's Western Division. This division then followed a route south in Georgia to Atlanta, Macon, Americus, Albany, and then on to Tallahassee, Florida. In 1916 the DHA approved a new Eastern Division running southeast from Atlanta to Waynesboro to Savannah, before continuing on to Jacksonville, Florida. That same year, a new Central Dixie Highway was added linking the Georgia towns Perry, Waycross, and Folkston, and then heading southward to Jacksonville.
. . .
The Dixie Highway ceased to exist by that name in 1926, when federal and state highway officials replaced named trails across America with numbered highways. Because the Dixie Highway was not a single highway, its various divisions became parts of the new U.S. numbered highway system (most notably U.S. 1, 17, 19, 25, 27, 41, and 129), plus a variety of state-numbered highways."