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Another big development includes old mine
It’s always interesting when a current news story touches on a little known fact about Jackson County’s past.
This week, while talking to erosion control officer Robbie Shelton about plans for developming RiverRock, a collection of subdivisions mostly on Cullowhee Mountain, Robbie mentioned that the area that will one day be the Phil Mickelson-designed golf course also includes what I’ve always heard called the old copper mine.
Another big Jackson County development, Balsam Mountain Preserve, includes a former ruby corundum (garnet) mine; the area is known locally as Ruby City.
While I’ve never actually hiked to the old copper mine, I understand it’s located just down from Cherry Gap on the Tuckasegee side of Cullowhee Mountain, the long high ridge that runs from Pine Creek to Speedwell and separates the Tuckaseigee River valley from the Cullowhee Creek valley. To find out more, I consulted the newsroom’s favorite reference book “The History of Jackson County.”
In a chapter titled “Economic Activities” written by one of my former Western Carolina University professors, John Bell, who lives on the Cullowhee Creek side of Cullowhee Mountain, I found lots of information about mining in general.
Jackson County’s most profitable mineral was kaolin. According to Bell, its production started in 1888, peaked around 1902 and ended by 1926. Much of it came from the Hog Rock Mine in Little Savannah, which was owned by entrepreneur C.J. Harris and two of his brothers.
Mica was the second-most profitable mineral. The first deposits were discovered in 1858 by Daniel David Davies on the road between Sylva and Franklin. He took samples to display at the South Carolina State Fair in 1866. By 1890 at least four mines were in operation, and leading producers were Robert Garrett, J.M. Long of Cullowhee, W.H.C. Rice of Cashiers and S.T. Bryson of Webster. According to Bell, World War I spurred mica production to three boxcar loads a week. Production declined after the war only to boom again with the coming of World War II because mica was important in the manufacture of electronic vacuum tubes. The federal government created the colonial Mica Corporation in 1942 to subsidize mica and guarantee production, Bell writes, and Graham W. Grindstaff, the local field representative of CMC, provided rental mining equipment and opened a trimming room in Sylva. CMC paid up to $5 per pound for top grade sheet mica, according to Bell.
Moving on to other minerals mined locally, Bell lists corundum and olivine, but says it was copper mining that has the oldest recorded history in Jackson County. And it was Davies, who spotted the mica on the roadway, who was at the center of those efforts. According to Bell, Davies was born in Wales and grew up a miner. He migrated to Pennsylvania where he worked for John D. Gray and Co. of Pittsburgh. During the 1850s, Gray sent Davies to “explore the Southern Appalachians for coal and other minerals.” It was Davies who discovered commercial deposits of coal in East Tennessee, Bell writes, and while visiting Jackson County in 1856, Davies discovered copper and mica and advised Gray to buy local mineral rights. When he was unable to persuade Gray to do so, Davies quit the company and returned to Jackson County and formed a partnership with William H. Bryson, William Coleman, John Walker, William Cowan and William Higdon. According to Bell, the group sought northern capital to open prospects at Cullowhee, Wayehutta, Savannah, Shell Ridge, Poor Ridge and Wolf Creek. The group failed to secure any money, Bell writes, because the state geologist didn’t know about Jackson’s copper deposits and told the potential northern investors who inquired that there was none.
Davies then took ore samples to Raleigh to prove his point, but, as Bell writes, “the Civil War intervened.”
Some copper mining occurred before 1900, but most of the ore was extracted between 1909 and 1932, Bell writes. Several efforts were made between the end of the Civil War and 1900, according to Bell, but nothing significant occurred until 1907, when Davies and Thomas A. Cox reopened the Cullowhee mine – the one on Cullowhee Mountain that started this story – and installed a 30-ton smelter, but no copper production was reported, according to Bell. The Cullowhee Mining and Reduction Co. took over in 1909 and sank a 177-foot vertical shaft and a 4,000-foot tunnel along the vein of copper. According to Bell, the ore produced was of poor quality, and the mine closed in 1912.
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