by Bill Carey, the Tennessee History GuyHISTORY LESSON

8 The Tennessee M agazine

The Origins of Tenn

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9D ecember 2006

by Bill Carey, the Tennessee History GuyHISTORY LESSON

Two reasons. First of all, to create thefires used to extract the copper, theyneeded fuel. Since there was no coal inthis area, they cut down every tree andburned it. As best we can tell they cutdown and burned every tree in this val-ley.

The other reason has to do withchemistry. When you heat a rock andseparate it into its elements, it releases

other things into the air. The extractionof copper from rock releases a sub-stance called sulfur dioxide. Sulfurdioxide, combined with the water in theatmosphere, creates sulfuric acid.

Sulfuric acid, or course, is a haz-ardous chemical, dangerous to plantsand animals in liquid form. When sulfu-ric acid was created in the air, it fell tothe ground and killed every living thing

The Ducktown Basin, in the

extreme southeast corner of

Tennessee, is sometimes referred to

as “Tennessee’s Badlands.” Unlike

the famed Badlands of South Dako-

ta, however, Tennessee’s version

was man-made.

In 1843, only a few years after

the Cherokee Indians were forced

out of southeast Tennessee, a man

discovered that some of the rocks in

the ground here contained copper. A

few years after the Civil War, people

began to mine the copper extensive-

ly.

Copper doesn’t come out of the

ground ready to be used. When they

pulled rocks from the copper mines

here, only a small part of them were

copper. In order to separate copper

from the rest of the rock, they had

to heat it (a process known as smelt-

ing). Smelting was done here before

the copper was shipped to other

places. And it was this process —

not the actual mining — that did

most of the environmental damage

in the Ducktown Basin.

Why?

nessee’s Badlands

At the Ducktown Basin Museum, visitors can view firsthand the damage left behindafter a century of copper mining. At left, the Burra Burra Mine collapse left a gapinghole in the earth. Above, one photo from the museum’s large collection gives visitorsa look into the life of the miners who risked their lives everyday.

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in this valley. In fact, only a few years of copper mining herecreated a dead landscape — 50 square miles where no plant oranimal lived.

The companies that owned the copper mines eventuallylearned to capture the sul-furic dioxide and bottlethe sulfuric acid they werecreating. In fact, sulfuricacid became a biggermoney-maker than the

copper itself, and the amount of pollution caused by the extrac-tion process was greatly decreased as technology improved.But the damage was already done.

Independent companies and the government have been try-ing for years to clean up the damage caused by copper miningand smelting. In the late 1940s, TVA was planting 500,000trees in the Ducktown Basin each year in hopes that this wouldrestore the environment. It helped, but it wasn’t that simple.The sulfuric acid, still in the ground water, was finding its wayinto area streams. In fact, as recently as 10 years ago an inspec-tion showed two area creeks were adding enough metal everyday to the Ocoee River to make two automobiles.

Today the environmental restoration of the Ducktown Basincontinues. The process is quite complicated. But to give you anidea of just how intense it is, there are two small creeks in theDucktown Basin that contain water treatment plants thatremove dissolved metals from the water.

One place to learn about all this is the Ducktown BasinMuseum. It is located at the top of a hill next to what used tobe known as the Burra Burra mine. Here you can learn allabout the history of this area and the copper mining that left itsmark here.

For example: When you get out of your car at the DucktownBasin Museum, look down the slope at the valley below. Seethe gaping hole? This is where the Burra Burra mine used tobe. The way they mined copper here was not by digging deeppits, but by tunneling deep into the ground and extracting rockin massive, man-made underground caverns (some of the cop-per mines here were 3,000 feet deep.) Some of these coppermines collapsed years later, creating huge holes. That’s whathappened here. This hole in the ground was created when partof the Burra Burra mine collapsed.

There’s a virtual tour of the Ducktown Basin Museum,along with many other historic attractions in Tennessee, on theTennessee History for Kids Web site. Just go to www.tnhisto-ryforkids.org, click on Virtual Tours, and then click on Duck-town Basin. For more information about the region go towww.tennesseeoverhill.com.

by Bill Carey, the Tennessee History GuyHISTORY LESSON

Tennessee History for KidsBill Carey is a Nashville author and

executive director of “Tennessee

History for Kids,” an online

Tennessee history textbook. For

more great stories of Ten-

nessee history, go to

www.tnhistoryforkids.org.

10 The Tennessee M agazine

Historic photographs displayed at the museum document the decades of technological advances made in mining the DucktownBasin. Unfortunately, they also document the resulting environmental disaster. Below, a photograph from the 1960s of CopperHill shows the devastation. Historic photographs courtesy of the Ducktown Basin Museum.

Ducktown Basin

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