The story of Asaph Perry

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ENTREPRENEUR STORY LINE
Opening Cohutta Springs Hopkins and Company Loan Family Business Barber Shop

Asaph's first entrepreneurial venture was as a "Dealer in Freshest Family Groceries, Tobacco, Cigars, Canned Goods, Etc." Sometime in the early 1890s, Asaph struck a partnership with W. D. Miller, a local Cherokee County merchant. Presumably, this partnership allowed Asaph to follow a more mercantilist path. Carrying his wares on the road, as a pre-modern traveling salesman of sorts, Asaph called on several mineral spring resorts, including Cohutta Springs on the Georgia-Tennessee boarder. These calls were ostensively directed at selling and trading medical goods, but Asaph, apparently, traveled to Cohutta Springs, and to another spring in Laughridge, Georgia, quite often, for other more personal reasons.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, mineral springs were commonly thought to offer much to the general well being of the sick and the healthy alike. Resorts near mineral springs were able to draw crowds of health seekers to otherwise obscure locations. The most famous of these springs in Georgia, Warms Springs, was the archetypical springs-based health/resort facility. Asaph traveled to Cohutta Springs and others, with and without his family, to improve his own health.

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Documents

The documentation for this portion of the story is interesting. We have a number of documents which seem to imply involvement in various business activities. The strongest evidence of Asaph's business supports his work as a barber. The evidence of his work with healing springs is similarly strong. In a letter to his wife Ethel, Asaph mentions traveling to healing springs. In one letter about a trip to a healing spring in Laughridge Georgia, Asaph tells Ethel that a man there "will put my watches in his store and help me sell them." We also know, from newspaper clippings, that Asaph visited Cohutta Springs for, at least personal, and probably business reasons.