Ducktown, TN

Ducktown is a Polk County city of 461 residents at the 2020 census, sitting in the middle of Tennessee's Copper Basin near the roads toward Georgia and North Carolina. A prospector found copper on Tater Creek in 1843, and Ducktown became the center of a mining district that operated from 1847 through 1987. Before the railroad arrived in 1890, refined copper made the two-day trip to Cleveland by mule-drawn wagon along the Old Copper Road beside the Ocoee River.

The Ducktown Basin Museum keeps the mining story right on the old ground. Local residents opened it in 1978, then moved it in 1982 to the former Burra Burra Mine site, where mining artifacts, company records, photographs, and large equipment fill out the picture. The collapsed and flooded mine works are still visible from the overlook. Around town, Big Frog Mountain and the Ocoee watershed give the Copper Basin a strong Appalachian frame, while State Route 68 and U.S. 64 carry the everyday traffic through a place whose landscape still carries the marks of copper.