Ducktown Smoke: The Fight over One of the South's Greatest Environmental Disasters

344 Pages·2011·16.63 MB·English

by  Duncan Maysilles

DUCKTOWNSMOKE
DUCKTOWNSMOKE
The Fight over One of the South’s Greatest Environmental Disasters
Duncan Maysilles
The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill
This book was published with the assistance of the
Thornton H. Brooks Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.
© 2011 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved. Designed by Kimberly Bryant. Set in Merlo with Avenir display by Tseng
Information Systems, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America. The paper in this book
meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines
for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press
has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Maysilles, Duncan.
Ducktown smoke : the fi ght over one of the south’s greatest environmental disasters /
Duncan Maysilles.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 8078-3 459- 6 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Liability for environmental damages—Appalachian Region, Southern. 2. Liability for
environmental damages—Tennessee—Ducktown Region. 3. Copper mines and mining—
Environmental aspects—Tennessee—Ducktown Region. 4. Georgia—Trials, litigation, etc.
I. Title.
KF1298.M39 2011
333.76Ð513709768875—dc22
2010047549
15 14 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1
To Teresa
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
INTRODUCTION The View from the Mountain 3
1 The Setting, the Cherokees, and the First Era of Ducktown
Mining, 1843–1878 14
2 The Revival of Ducktown Mining and the First Smoke Suits,
1890–1903 36
3 The Farmers and the Copper Companies Wage Battle in the
Tennessee Courts 58
4 Georgia Enters the Fray 81
5 The Ducktown Desert and Georgia’s First Smoke Suit 105
6 Will Shippen, Forestry, and Georgia’s Second Smoke Suit,
1905–1907 141
7 Attorney General Hart, the National Farmers Union, and the
Search for a Remedy, 1907–1910 170
8 The Smoke Injunction and the Great War, 1914–1918 195
9 Power Dams, Whitewater Rafting, and the Reclamation of the
Ducktown Desert, 1916–2010 222
EPILOGUE The View from the Mountain 251
Notes 259 Bibliography 301 Index 321
A map of Ducktown and vicinity and a section of photographs follow page 128.
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Acknowledgments
The present work delves deeply into four distinct, though overlapping, fi elds
of history: legal, environmental, southern, and Appalachian. The History De-
partment at the University of Georgia proved to be a wonderful place to pur-
sue such a project because of its strengths in each of these fi elds. Peter Hoffer,
James Cobb, John Inscoe, Edward Larson, and Paul Sutter freely provided
their valuable encouragement, insights, and critique. Moreover, Dr. Cobb
and Dr. Hoffer have both written on Ducktown but nonetheless gave me
their enthusiastic support and shared their materials to further my own
work. My experience with these scholars, individually and collectively, was
personally and professionally rewarding.
Monograph history depends on skilled archivists, and this project was no
exception. I enjoyed the kind assistance of archivists at the Georgia Depart-
ment of Archives and History, the Tennessee State Library and Archives, the
Historical Branch at the Cleveland (Tennessee) Public Library, the National
Archives in Washington, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. I owe
thanks to Jane Adams of the Georgia Archives. When working on another
project, I came across her research guide, The Calendar of Incoming Correspon-
dence, Governor Hugh M. Dorsey, 1917–1921, in which she wrote, “Possible top-
ics of research interest in the Dorsey correspondence include the First World
War, prohibition and reform movements and the Tennessee Copper Com-
pany case.” Though I never met her, I made it my purpose to follow her sug-
gestion about the copper case.
Special mention goes to Ken Rush, Richard Estes, and the staff of the
Ducktown Basin Museum. I was the benefi ciary of their successful efforts to
rescue and preserve documents from the era of smoke litigation. A mass of
century- old documents from the Tennessee Copper Company and the Duck-
town Sulphur, Copper & Iron Company had been stored haphazardly in an
abandoned store near the former DSC I complex at Isabella. Years of neglect
under a leaking roof reduced the papers to a sodden, moldy pile that was
destined to be tossed as rubbish down a mineshaft except for the museum’s
timely intervention. The rescued materials are rich in behind- the- scenes cor-
respondence from attorneys, corporate offi cers, farmers, loggers, and others
on both sides of the litigation—the sort of documents that discretion and the
conventions of litigation usually omit from the formal papers fi led with the
courts.