Tucked into the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, straddling the border between Georgia and Tennessee, is a town that should not still exist. It is a town with two personalities, two histories and two names. On the Georgia side, it's called McCaysville. With a population of just over a thousand people, there isn't much to see outside of the sleepy downtown. These days, McCaysville is a town surviving on tourism but, just barely, it seems - a scattering of gift shops, restaurants and boarded-up brick facades line the main drag. The state line cuts the town clean near in half - it runs right through the parking lot of the local grocery store, across Toccoa Avenue and just misses The Pearly Gates Cafe. At the corner of the building, a weathered woodcut marker with GA/TN blazed across the front is a popular photo op for tourists.
In stark contrast to the old-fashioned drug stores and fudge shoppes of McCaysville, this "city in the hills" has a dark side. Just over the state line in Tennessee, the town goes by a more evocative name - Copperhill. In the early 1840s, local prospectors discovered a deposit of copper ore and immediately set to work transforming this low-lying area (soon to be known as the Copper Basin) into one of the most lucrative copper mines in the country. However, as the extraction of copper ore skyrocketed, so too did an unintended consequence - which is the reason I say this town perhaps should not exist.
Because it's been just the two of us for so long, my mother and I have this Thanksgiving tradition where, instead of cooking a big meal, we try and do something unconventional - in years past it's ranged from simple Chinese buffets to riverboat cruises on the Tennessee River. This year, as a kickoff to my cross-country road trip, we decided to splurge (as much as two people on very limited budgets can) by taking a day-long scenic train trip through the mountains.
Replace the jaunty piano with deafening rickety train sounds and you get the idea.
(Source: Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum)
Beginning in Etowah, TN and winding 25 miles along the Hiwassee River, this five-car excursion train slowly chugs through the lower Appalachians, offering exquisite views of the North Carolina mountains and TVA-era dams and pumping stations. The train itself is made up of a collection of passenger rail cars from the 1940s, each with its own unique year, country of origin, color palette and odor. For our car: 1948; Canada; complementary shades of faded jade green Formica; and cold leather, respectively.
As the train reaches the final few miles of its route, those with an environmentally-inclined sharp eye will notice a gradual but dramatic change in the scenery. The aged oak-hickory forest with its shady understory and leaf-litter floor eventually gives way to a new landscape dominated by only two types of plants - pines (White, Loblolly and Virginia) and kudzu. Though the pines are all indigenous, any good Southerner worth his weight in red clay knows that kudzu is definitely not native - in fact, it's invasive as all hell. Introduced from Japan during the early half of the 20th century as a way to control erosion, this voracious member of the pea family is an indicator of damaged landscapes - spreading over bare earth at a rate of a foot a day. This rapid growth combined with its expansive reach throughout the region has earned kudzu a reputation as "the vine that ate the South" and Copperhill is no exception. As the kudzu comes into view, this transition between balanced and unbalanced ecosystems announces loud and clear that you are now entering the Copper Basin.
As we approached downtown McCaysville, our train slowed to a stop and paused on the track to allow the engine to decouple - it had pulled us through the mountains but for the remaining quarter mile or so, it would push us into the station. That way, the whole train could depart after lunch with the engine back up front for the return journey. As the other passengers fidgeted impatiently in their seats, stomachs growling, I overheard a young woman wonder aloud why we were parked in an industrial rail yard next to some weird rock formation.
Slag Dump @ Copperhill, TN
(Source: The author's own)
Unbeknownst to her, this "rock formation" is actually one of the most fascinating remnants of the dark side of the McCaysville/Copperhill story and the real reason I was so excited about this whole train trip idea in the first place.
I said before that McCaysville/Copperhill is a town that perhaps should no longer exist; let me explain why.
When you think of copper, you likely picture a spool of wire or maybe a handful of pennies (these days pennies are primarily zinc but prior to 1982 they used to be solid copper). What you're imagining is not copper in its natural state - it is the end result of a long process called smelting. What the early prospectors discovered back in the 1840s was copper ore - native copper combined with other minerals and elements. After being pulled from below the earth via deep shaft mines, this ore needed to be purified in a process known as extraction. Now, here's where things get ugly.
To extract the the copper from the ore, you have to burn it. In the early years of mining in the Copper Basin, they built massive heaps of ore and burned them right there in the open using the only fuel source available - wood. By the 1870s, over 50 square miles of timber had been felled. Once the copper was extracted, the remaining molten ore (known as slag) was transported via rail and discarded over the edge of a man-made hill.
"Slag cars" discarding molten slag down a hillside at a facility in Russia.
(Source)
Over time, this "slag dump" grew into a massive rippled wall of rust-colored material over thirty feet high (this is the weird "rock formation" pointed out by the young woman on the train). Think Ayers Rock in Australia but fortunately not as big.
Now, as if the open-heap smelting process weren't problematic enough, burning anything produces gases as a byproduct - in this case, due to the ore's high sulfur content, the smoldering heaps released millions of tons of sulfur gas into the atmosphere which, when reacting with moisture in the air, produced acid rain. Everyone's heard that term before but this acid rain was next level. God forbid you hung your laundry out to dry on a day when the winds shifted your way - it would eat up a pair of nylon stockings in minutes. Seriously, it was that bad. Unfortunately though, ladies' underwear wasn't the only victim of this chemical menace. Because the landscape around the mines had been stripped clear of tree cover, the acid rain fell directly on the more delicate understory vegetation and killed that, too. For over one hundred years, the area known as the Copper Basin looked like this:
This is why the EPA exists, folks.
(Source)
In the early 1900s, the smelters were enclosed and a nearby plant constructed to capture and reclaim the sulfur dioxide fumes for commercial uses such as fertilizer and preservatives. Though by no means a cure-all, this solution was at least a step in the right direction.
These environmentally abusive practices continued to poison the land for decades until finally, in the 1980s, changing economies and regulatory pressures forced the mines to close once and for all (sulphuric acid production continued through the 1990s but eventually, this operation shut down as well and the plant was sold of, piece by piece).
Without its anchor industry, McCaysville/Copperhill would surely have gone the way of other post-industrial cities were it not for a coincidentally well-timed tourism boom in the mid-90s. Just ten miles north of the city, along the banks of the Ocoee River, the newly constructed Ocoee Whitewater Center hosted the canoe slalom during the 1996 Olympic Games. Cementing the area as a local mecca for outdoorsy-types, tourism money continues to flow into the Copper Basin from kayakers, mountain bikers and, like my mother and me, riders of the Hiwassee River excursion train.
So when I say McCaysville/Copperhill shouldn't exist, I mean that the odds were stacked against it from the beginning - and yet, here it is: a city with new life, now with tourism in its blood instead of molten copper. With fudge shoppes and drug stores instead of smokestacks and tailings ponds. A place where, once again, a lady can hang her delicates out to dry without fear of the very air itself eating them off the line.
After a delicious lunch you could only find in a small Southern town ("catfish nuggets and fries"), we shuffled back to the train, struggling against hope to stay awake for the ride back to Etowah. However, though our long-anticipated train trip was coming to an end, my business with Copperhill was only just beginning.
CWO