Ellijay sits seventeen to twenty miles southwest of Blue Ridge on US-76 and GA-515, and it is the strongest satellite in this market by every measure we can check. About 1,862 people live in the city, up roughly fifteen percent since 2010, in a Gilmer County that has grown from 31,353 to about 33,894. That is a bigger residential base than the anchor city has, and it means ordinary weeks and standing appointments rather than only checkout times.
It is also a cabin market in its own right. The rentals here are not spillover from Blue Ridge -- Gilmer County has its own inventory, growing fast, and the property managers who work these mountains market Ellijay cabins as a separate destination. Almost all of it is entire homes, three bedrooms is the most common size, and the amenity list reads the same as it does over the ridge: hot tubs, wood-burning fireplaces, screened porches, game rooms, fire pits.
The town has a character of its own. Ellijay is the Apple Capital of Georgia, the Georgia Apple Festival lands mid-October -- the same weekend the cabins are fullest -- and the Ellijay and Cartecay Rivers meet here to form the Coosawattee. Poultry raising and processing is the largest agricultural sector in the county, at roughly a third of county revenue, with manufacturing at about a fifth. East Ellijay, contiguous with Ellijay along the GA-5 and GA-515 bypass, carries the retail corridor and the Cartecay River frontage. Dalton State College runs a campus here.
And this is the one place in this market where Spanish is a mass-market surface rather than a policy commitment. Between 28.9 and 31.6 percent of Ellijay residents are Hispanic, East Ellijay is about a third, and Gilmer County runs 11.5 to 13.4 percent -- in a Fannin County that runs around four percent. Every page of this site has a full Spanish version, and we take quotes and schedule work in either language.
