As long as I can remember, the group of stone buildings have occupied the corner of highways 5 and 108 in Jasper. The main route north from Atlanta was old highway 5 (before the 4-lane arrived). Family and friends would come up highway 5 and turn right at the stone motel on their way to the mountain cabin. Not long ago, one of the cousins was trying to remember how to get here and said, "Do you still go up to Jasper and turn right at the old stone motel?"
The Archer Hotel stood on this site until it burned in 1947. People would get off the train at the depot and cross Burnt Mountain Road to stay at the hotel. There was a large dining room, and the boarders were treated to Mrs. Archer's famous fried chicken. Mrs. Roxie Archer, a young widow with two children, had purchased the hotel in the 1920s. After the hotel burned, she decided to rebuild, this time a motor court. Motor courts were becoming popular since the war and usually amounted to a group of small tourist cabins. Possibly because of the memory of the recent fire, Archer Court was solidly constructed, two-story buildings faced with flagstone, Jasper's first motel. Mrs. Archer ran Archer Court until the 1970s. For a while after that, it was called Greystone Village, shops and apartments. It has been empty for some time now, windows shattered, running down.
Now the sign says a new Walgreen's drug store is coming soon. Right across the street from the new Eckerd's drug store, a block up from CVS drug store, and a couple blocks from Jasper Drugs. Who knew there was such a need for drug stores in this little town!"The old Archer Court just waits now. A wrecking crew will come and level the place and make way for something new. Cleared down to red dirt, the old, old land will again give a place for dreams to rise. Decades after a new drugstore is steeled and mortared and its broad lot paved, wreckers will come again. Their leveling work will make way another time for something new. And scratching the earth, they will turn over shards of flagstone, never guessing they are touching pieces of a dream that belonged to a woman they never knew." - Jeff Warren, from the newspaper article in Pickens Progress - "A History of Greystone Village, Archer Court"
