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More reminders of county’s past
Increased access to technology may have provided the link to the past mentioned in this space last week – a deed for a huge tract of land in the Blackrock/Soco area once owned by Dr. John Brinkley that my husband, Richard, found while researching online county records – but it was old-fashioned foot power that led to our weekend discoveries.
The first one came Saturday when we headed for Haywood Gap and a section of the Mountains to the Sea Trail we had never walked. As we approached the Blue Ridge Parkway, Richard glanced at a large rock near the trail and spied a marker we’d been looking for ever since we found one like it on Wolf Creek. The benchmark, as the National Geodetic Survey calls the round disk we found, was placed there by Tennessee Valley Authority survey crews around 1940. Each is numbered and marked on topo maps, and a precise description of benchmark locations is available at the NGS website. We found LHT 1737 at an elevation of 5,225 feet on Saturday. Like its twin, LHT 1738, which we found almost exactly four years earlier, on March 2, 2003, LHT 1737 is a greenish metal marker about 3 inches in diameter that’s firmly affixed to a large boulder.
“Useful information,” it reads. “Please do not remove.” Additional lettering indicates it was put in place in 1940 by the TVA. For more information, it said, we should contact the “chief engineer” at Wilson Dam, Alabama.
Our second hike, on Sunday, was to the former copper mine in Cullowhee. That mine was in the news in January because it’s located on property that’s slated for development into the RiverRock gated communities that will include a Phil Mickelson-designed golf course. The old mine site is 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. More information is available in “The History of Jackson County.” From a chapter titled “Economic Activities” written by one of my former Western Carolina University professors, John Bell, I learned about mining in general and the copper mine in particular.
Copper mining in Jackson County was centered around the efforts of David Daniel Davies, a Welshman who also spotted the first mica deposits in the area. Davies left Wales for 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, 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 to mine the areas himself.
Some copper mining occurred before 1900, but most of the ore was extracted after that year. Several efforts were made between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the 20th century, according to Bell, but nothing significant occurred until 1907, when Davies and Thomas A. Cox reopened the Cullowhee Mountain mine. They installed a 30-ton smelter, but no copper production was reported. 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, but the ore produced was of poor quality and the mine closed in 1912.
Traces of the mine remain among a tangle of shrubs and briers. The vertical shaft is there, along with a pile of tailings left over from mining operations; two small holding ponds are visible through the trees.
The copper mine made its mark on area maps, too. The small creek that forms in its hollow, called Tennessee Creek on many old land grants, is now known as Mine Branch.
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