Daniels-Eisenstaedt Photo Tour: Ducktown and Copperhill
Jonathan Daniels left Raleigh on Sunday, June 26, 1938, to meet up with Alfred Eisenstaedt in eastern Tennessee. Among their first stops together were Ducktown and Copperhill--places that showed that, despite heightened concerns about farmers overworking the land, soil erosion and other environmental damage were not limited to the old cotton-growing districts of the South.
In his book, Daniels described Copperhill as a "desert in the forests." Only 50 miles away from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, this copper-mining area was "a terrifying picture of what man can swiftly do to his earth" (A Southerner Discovers the South, 73-74).
The factory pictured in some of the images linked below was a Copperhill smelting plant that released sulfuric acid into the atmosphere as a byproduct of the process of extracting copper from rock.
Copperhill-1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Move on to Chattanooga