Imagine, 150 years ago, 50 square miles of heavily-forested rolling hills, healthy and green, teeming with wildlife, populated by a few small towns and a scattering of farm families.
Now imagine valuable minerals being discovered there. A large mining and smelting industry arises. In order to fuel the smelting process, the trees for miles around are systematically cut down.
Imagine how, after the land is denuded, erosion sets in, leaving a virtual moonscape where only scattered weeds and a few hardy insects survive.
Imagine, further, that a byproduct of the smelting process is sulfuric acid, which the factories belch into the atmosphere, where it mixes with water vapor to form acid rain.
For decades, the region is saturated with it. All remaining wildlife and vegetation in that 50 square miles is snuffed out.
This photo shows the “Copper Basin” region of southern Tennessee in the 1960s:
Mining of copper in the valley began in the 1840s. Widespread deforestation got underway after the Civil War. By 1890, because of the open-air method of smelting used at the time, acid rain began to fall.
By the time the copper companies learned to capture the sulfuric acid (a valuable commodity itself), the damage to the land was done.
Sometime in the early 1990s, I passed through the Copper Basin for the first time. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.
The area around the little community of Ducktown, the site of the largest of the old copper mines, was one of the most horrifying, wretchedly appalling places my jaded eyes have ever seen.
At the time, the land was in the process of recovering from this self-inflicted ecological disaster, and the region had come a long way. Even so, what I saw was shocking.
Last week, on a road trip that took me through that same corner of Tennessee, I visited Ducktown for the second time.
The land is still ugly and ravaged-looking. Giant slag heaps stand next to abandoned mine buildings that once housed boilers and machine shops. I saw a small creek that ran with an ominous, oily orange sheen on the surface.
But the Copper Basin today looks considerably less like the surface of the Moon. So far, 16 million trees have been planted in the region, and the hillsides have been seeded with acid-resistant grasses. The predominant color of the basin is changing from tan to green.
For years, Ducktown and the other communities in the Copper Basin were busy places. For the extractive industries there, business was good. Among the residents, community life revolved around the mining industry. At their peak, the mines and smelters provided as many as 10,000 jobs.
Frankly, Ducktown today has little going for it except its past. At the site of the old Burra Burra Mine on a hill above town is a small museum that displays historic artifacts and photos. The downtown historic district is mostly empty.
Where, you probably wonder, did the curious name “Ducktown” come from? Well, in the late 1700s, the Cherokee village of Kawana was located there, and in English, “Kawana” means “duck town.”
And what, exactly, is the “duck” connection? The village was named in honor of a respected Cherokee leader of the time, Chief Duck. Now you know.
I left Ducktown that day with two impressions.
One is the obvious: the lesson we ought to learn, but never do, about the consequences of unchecked industrial pollution.
The other is that, in spite of this terrible history, the Ducktown residents seem to remember the old days, including the barren moonscape they lived in, with genuine fondness.
One of the women who works at the museum told me about life in Ducktown over the decades. She grew up in an ordinary house there, and she later raised a family in the town. She described a normal life involving friends, school, church, and community activities.
But no vegetation could grow. The children weren’t able to play in the dirt or wade in the creeks.
There were no wild animals and very few domestic. There was no firewood or kindling. Food, water, fuel, and everything else was trucked in for them by the mining companies. The only time she saw flowers or crops or cattle grazing in a field was on trips with her parents outside the Copper Basin.
But, she explained, the bleak terrain and the conditions they lived under made the residents feel unique. She said the moonscape surrounding them was, in its way, very beautiful. She misses it.
That seems to be the prevailing attitude in Ducktown.
At the museum is a brochure that tells about the decades-long program to neutralize the acid in the soil and re-vegetate the basin. The brochure reports that the program is making steady progress.
With obvious regret, however, the brochure concludes that the Copper Basin is slowly returning to a condition of “common green.”
A copper smelting plant in the basin, 1939.
Site of one of the Ducktown copper mines, 1939.
View from a hill overlooking Ducktown today, showing the return of “common green” to the region. The small lake is a sinkhole formed when an abandoned shaft of the Burra Burra Mine collapsed. The pit is filled with rainwater, which gets its green color from copper ore.
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