Journey Electric
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Chattooga County, Georgia

Electrician in Lyerly, Georgia

Lyerly is a town of 454 people on less than a square mile of southern Chattooga County, six miles down Georgia 114 from Summerville, with the Chattooga River running along its southeastern edge. It is also the only place on our map that once generated its own electricity. A man named James S. Owings started the Chattooga River Power Company and built a dam on the river here in 1919. It first made power in 1920. A flood tore the thing up a month later, and it was repaired and running again two weeks after that. In 1923 Owings put a concrete dam across the river, and portions of that are still in the water where you can see them from the Lyerly Dam bridge. The power company is gone. The concrete is not, and that split is worth carrying into any building in this town: what gets left behind outlasts what was doing the work, and the part that was doing the work is the part nobody goes back to look at.

The dam, the depot, and the two towns underneath the name

These run backward through the town's own dates. The dam came last and is the best known of the three. The depot is why there is a town here at all. The two settlements underneath the name came before either of those, and they are the reason the roads out here matter more than the town name does.

Lyerly Dam, and the company that put it there
The dam is the town's best known landmark and it started as a business. James S. Owings built it in 1919 for the Chattooga River Power Company, which he started, and it first generated in 1920. A month into production a flood took it apart, and two weeks after that it was back. He poured a concrete dam across the river in 1923, and some of that concrete is still there to be looked at from the Lyerly Dam bridge. Today the site is where the town's canoe and kayak trail starts, a launch on Lyerly Dam Road with a run of seven and a half miles down to the take-out on Holland-Chattoogaville Road. Stand there and you are looking at the durable half of an electrical installation with the working half removed. That is the ordinary shape of this trade. Concrete, conduit, boxes and masonry are what survive. Conductors, connections, controls and machines are what fail, and they fail quietly, out of sight, long after everyone has stopped thinking of the place as electrical at all.
The depot blocks, and the order things arrived in
Lyerly exists because a railroad put a depot here. Angus McLeod donated the land for it in 1888, the Chattanooga, Rome and Columbus Railroad built on it, the town lots were laid out on McLeod's ground, and the city park still carries his name. A post office followed in 1889 and the town incorporated in 1891, probably named for Charles A. Lyerly, a Chattanooga banker who had bought land around here. What is useful about the decades after that is the order of it. The town's own history has A.J. Lee putting in the first water system in 1911. By 1912 Lyerly had two telephone exchanges, the only town in the county with two. A brick school replaced the 1889 one in 1914. Electricity came last, in 1920, from the dam. So this town was plumbed and talking before it was lit, and every one of those systems went in separately, under a different name, within about ten years of each other. The town's own history also claims a first for the place: it says Lyerly was the first town in northwest Georgia to ship poultry to markets in other states.
Glenwood and Melville, underneath the name
Lyerly is a young name on old ground. Two settlements were here first and both got absorbed. Glenwood sat about a mile northwest, out around where Smallen Road, Oak Hill and Back Valley Road meet now. Melville started in the 1850s, well south of Summerville on what is Georgia 100 today, then moved its post office across the Chattooga River in the 1870s to sit just southeast of where Lyerly is, with the rest of the town following it over. Melville is why the depot landed where it did, three quarters of a mile north of it, and Melville did not survive that. It went bankrupt and was auctioned off on the courthouse steps in Summerville on the second of July, 1889. All of which is a long way of saying that the ground people call Lyerly is a good deal larger than the town, and part of it is on the far side of a river. So when you call, give us the road rather than the town. It is the difference between a trip we have planned and a trip we are guessing at.

What a Rome base means for Lyerly

Seventeen miles is what this page prints for Lyerly, and the town sits out on Georgia 114 instead of on the highway that carries most of this county, which makes it somewhere you set out for rather than somewhere you pass through. Work here gets planned as its own visit for that reason. Where that lands on you is the phone call. Be specific about the ugly parts when you describe what is going on, because a few of them change the answer outright: anything hot to the touch, anything smelling like burning plastic, buzzing coming out of a panel, a breaker that will not stay in. Those are not scheduling questions. They are things you get talked through doing something about right then, before anybody is on the road. And if what you describe turns out not to be an electrical fault at all, you get told that plainly instead of getting a visit.

What Lyerly homes tend to call about

All three come out of the town's own history, and all three end up somewhere you can go and look. What outlasts what. What order the systems arrived in. And what happens when everything in a place runs through one machine and the machine goes.

  • The power company is gone. Its concrete is still in the river. That happens on a smaller scale inside buildings all the time, and it is worth understanding, because the leftovers are not always dead. When something gets removed and the wire that fed it does not, you are left with a conductor that goes nowhere. A shed comes down and the feed to it stays buried. A well house, a pump, an old water heater, a window unit on its own circuit: the appliance leaves and the cable stays stapled to a joist with cut ends. Here is the part that catches people. A wire that no longer feeds anything is only safe if somebody disconnected it at the source, and the dangerous version is the one snipped at the far end and left landed on a breaker. It is live, it is bare, and it is somewhere nobody is thinking about. Treat any unidentified conductor as energized until it has been proved otherwise with a meter, and understand that a non-contact tester staying silent is not proof of anything. The right fix is not tape. It is tracing the run back, killing it at the source, and either pulling it out or terminating it properly where it can still be reached. A wiring inspection of what is actually there and removing circuits that no longer serve anything.
  • This town was wired for talking eight years before it was wired for light. Two telephone exchanges in 1912, power in 1920. A century on, both kinds of wire still share the same walls, and the low voltage side is the one that gets treated as harmless. It mostly is, right up until it is not. Internet cable, coax, camera and alarm wire and thermostat runs get pulled through the same bored holes as power cable, stapled to the same joists and sometimes routed straight through a panel, usually by somebody who does not work on the line voltage side and has no reason to think about it. Two rules do most of the work here. Communications cable does not share a hole, a raceway or a box with line voltage conductors unless the whole assembly is listed for that, because the insulation on one was never designed to be the only thing standing between you and the other. And a staple driven through a cable is a fault waiting on a wet season, whichever kind of cable it went through. One honest limit while we are on it. If your internet is slow or your cameras keep dropping off the network, that is nearly always the provider or the gear itself and not the wiring in the walls, which is an answer you should be given rather than a job you should be sold. What is ours is the power feeding all of it: the receptacle the router lives on, the little transformer nobody has looked at in years, and the circuit that dips every time something bigger starts up. Electrical troubleshooting and whole-house surge protection.
  • Lyerly once had one switch that mattered, on a river a mile out of town. When the river took the dam in 1920, everybody was out together, because everything ran through one machine. Your building has its own version of that, and most people could not point to it in daylight, let alone at two in the morning with something going wrong. Find your main disconnect now. In most houses it is the largest breaker at the top of the panel, marked with the service size. It can also be a separate disconnect outside next to the meter, and in older setups it can be a pull-out block or a set of cartridge fuses instead of a breaker. Go and look at it while nothing is happening. Make sure you can stand in front of it and swing your arm without moving a freezer or a stack of boxes first, make sure it is labeled, and make sure whoever else lives there knows where it is too. Two things to be clear about. Throwing that main kills everything downstream of it, but the conductors running from the meter to it stay live, which is one of several reasons the cover stays on. And if there is smoke, a burning smell, heat coming off the panel, or any buzzing or crackling from it, do not open anything and do not investigate. Get everyone out and call 911 from outside. Cutting the main on your way past is worth doing only if it is somewhere you can reach safely without going toward the problem. What counts as an electrical emergency and panel and service work.

Every service, across Lyerly

Every service below runs in Lyerly, the small ones included. The list looks the same here as it does anywhere else on this site, and that is the point of printing it: nothing came off it because the town is 454 people on three quarters of a square mile.

Request a quote in Lyerly

Tell us what needs doing and we'll come back to you. Photos help more than descriptions, and you can text those over once we reply.

Prefer to talk? Call (706) 784-7272.

Licensed, and close enough

Every job runs under the owner's Georgia electrical license, and Georgia licenses this trade at every job size. The license covers one dead outlet in Lyerly the same way it covers a panel change.

Based in Rome, about 17 miles from Lyerly.

Measured point to point rather than along a road, so the drive is longer than the number.

One trade, not a handyman list

Journey Electric does electrical work and only electrical work. The carpentry, drywall and general repair side belongs to Journey Home Services, a separate business under the same owner, with its own phone number. A list with both on it is two bookings rather than one, and knowing that before the day beats finding it out during it.

The rest of the area

Also covered, with distances from Rome:

Service area detail

Electrical questions in Lyerly

Is it true Lyerly used to make its own electricity?

It is. James S. Owings started the Chattooga River Power Company and built the Lyerly Dam in 1919, and it first generated power in 1920. A month after production started a flood damaged it badly, and it was repaired and back online two weeks later. In 1923 Owings built a concrete dam across the river, and portions of that are still standing where you can see them from the Lyerly Dam bridge. The site today is the launch for the town's canoe and kayak trail down to Holland-Chattoogaville Road. What we will not tell you is where your power comes from today. That one belongs to whoever sends you the electric bill, and the answer is printed on it.

The old dam is a ruin. Does anything like that turn up in a house?

The same pattern does, yes, and it is the useful part of the story. Buildings collect wire that used to feed something and no longer feeds anything: a shed that came down, a pump that was replaced, an old water heater, a window unit that had its own circuit. The cable often stays. That matters because a wire going nowhere is only dead if it was disconnected at the source, and the version that hurts people is the one cut off at the far end and left connected to a live breaker. If you find an unidentified cable with bare ends in a crawlspace, an attic or a garage, leave it alone and treat it as energized. A non-contact tester that stays quiet has not proved anything. The proper fix is to trace it, kill it at the source, and either pull it out or land it properly in a box that stays reachable.

We have internet, camera and alarm wiring run all through the house. Is any of that an electrician's problem?

Sometimes. Lyerly had two telephone exchanges running by 1912 and no electric power at all until 1920, so low voltage wire has been in these walls longer than line voltage has, and it still gets treated as the harmless half. It mostly is. What complicates it is that it goes through the same bored holes and along the same joists as power cable, usually pulled by somebody who does not work on the line voltage side. The rule worth knowing is that communications cable should not share a hole, a raceway or a box with line voltage conductors unless the whole assembly is listed for that. A staple driven through any of it is a problem waiting on damp weather. The other half of the answer is less flattering to us: if the internet is slow or the cameras keep dropping, that is nearly always the provider or the equipment, and pointing you back at them beats putting a truck in your driveway. What is genuinely ours is the power side of it, meaning the receptacle that gear is plugged into, the transformer feeding a low voltage device, and a circuit that sags every time something large starts up.

Electrical work in Lyerly?

Say what's happening and where the house is. You'll get a straight answer on what's involved and what to do in the meantime.

(706) 784-7272 Request a quote