Earlier this year I came across photos a hiker had posted online of a cemetery in Paulding County. After some investigation I learned that it was actually in the Buncombe District, Polk County and told it was known locally as the Pegamore Cemetery, named for the nearby creek.
Pegamore seems to be an oddly unique localized place name. There’s Pegamore Creek, Pegamore Lake, the cemetery and now a few road names that have popped up in recent years. I don’t think any other place on earth has a Pegamore except our area of Georgia. There had to be a story behind it. The late Hubert Holland gathered up a few in his brief history of Pegamore Creek.
“How did Pegamore Creek derive its name,” he asked. Mr. Holland gave a few theories that it was (1) named after an “Indian Female,” most likely Cherokee, called Peggymore; (2) that the creek was more peggy, branching off into several prongs; (3) that it’s from the pegmatite deposits found throughout the county, misspelled as Pegamore and lastly - some variation of people mixing up the spelling and pronunciation of Peggymore and Pegmatite.
While I’m not familiar with mining, misspelled and mispronounced names are what genealogists encounter daily. The idea that it could be named after a person seemed to be the most logical. Peggy is a common nickname for Margaret, so perhaps there was a Margaret Moore who lived in the vicinity. A search did not turn up any contenders.
I turned to Newspapers.com to see if there were any uses of the name outside of the Paulding County area and was surprised to find advertisements for Pegamore Leather couches produced by the Shiverick Furniture Co. of Omaha, Nebraska in 1901. For a period in the early 1900’s Pegamore Leather was a fad term, but it appears to have been a bit like the Corinthian Leather in the old Chrysler ads. Something that sounded a bit fancy but wasn’t real. It faded from use in the leather goods trade fairly quickly.
A search on Familysearch.org then produced a very promising document, one with a direct link to the Pegamore Creek area. An Application for Citizenship into the Cherokee Nation by petitioner, Jasper R. Robinson of Stilesboro, Bartow County, Georgia dated Sep. 2, 1896.
Jasper’s pedigree for admittance named his father, James Robinson, grandmother Linda English and great grandmother Bettie Pegamore, who was a “full blooded Cherokee Indian woman.” Bettie Pegamore was to have resided in Habersham and Franklin Counties before being removed out west. Proof could be furnished, he says, and names should be found on the Census rolls of “Cherokees East of the Mississippi River.” Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, I’ve not found them in the records available to me.
The first record of the Robinson family in Paulding County was the marriage of James Robertson to Malinda Parton, 1841. Not the last time their surname would be spelled thus. The officiant was Joseph James, a Justice of the Peace in the High Shoals district. It is in this district they are found in the 1850 Paulding County Census. One of the more interesting details of this record is that it shows the birthplace of young Jasper as Missouri. For a brief period around 1844 the family had crossed the Mississippi River before returning to Paulding. It would be interesting to find if they traveled to see their Cherokee relatives out West.
In Georgia the Robinsons would be found in several district records: High Shoals, Van Wert, Rockmart, Buncombe, Stilesboro. At the heart of these places, it is perhaps not surprising to find a little creek system that is supposed to bear the name of their self- proclaimed ancestor, Bettie Pegamore.
If you are a descendant of James Robinson please reach out to the Paulding County Genealogical Society at .

Photo Credit is to Todd Tibbitts, submitted by Shelly Sidhu