Thursday, September 10, 2009

City Sophistication

On the way to Atlanta for Richard’s medical care, we stopped in Copper Hill, Tennessee for lunch. Isn’t it funny how many small town businesses try to make people think they’re sophisticated city businesses by giving themselves high-falutin’ names? It seems that the Greek immigrant who opened New York Restaurant and Hotel in Copper Hill, Tennessee in 1927 used this method of declaring that his place was as good as any you’d find in New York. I wonder if he’d ever even seen the Big Apple.

I don’t think anyone ever came through Copper Hill looking for a good Jewish deli’s pastrami on rye. You also won’t get chopped liver, but you may get fried chicken liver as their Wednesday lunch special. Good Southern home cooking is their forte. Why put on airs? The waitress sure doesn’t.

We like New York Restaurant partly because it’s so small town folksy. The food is good, and the walls are lined with before and after photos of the 1990 flood when the Ocoee River overflowed its banks and inundated the town. Or was it the Toccoa River that flooded the place?

You see, as you stand on the state line in the middle of the bridge crossing the river and look to one side, the river is in Tennessee and is called the Ocoee. On the other side of the bridge, the river is in Georgia – and is called the Toccoa. Given the current discussions between Georgia and Tennessee about water rights, who knows whose river flooded whose property? But, then again, Tennessee has a long and colorful history of property line feuds.

Copper Hill’s name comes from the copper mining that used to be king there. You can still see a huge mound of iron ore tailings from the mining operations. I’m surprised that nobody has decided to open an amusement park with “Miner’s Mountain” roller coaster barreling down the rust-colored hill.

Though the copper basin area is now lush with timber, in the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, the city and surrounding areas were completely devoid of vegetation – an unforeseen consequence of the sulfuric acid byproduct of the “open roast heap” method of copper production.

Reforestation efforts began in the 1920s and continued until the 1940s. Much of this work was done by the Civilian Conservation Corps, as was much nature conservation work in Coker Creek. In fact, the CCC camps were prime sources of local husbands back in the day.

Copper Hill and Ducktown (“A Quacking Good Place” is their city slogan) are currently known primarily as the entryway into the Cherokee National Forest and the Ocoee River. The Ocoee was the site of the 1996 Olympic Canoe and Kayak Slalom Competition. Whitewater rafting enthusiasts come from all over the world to challenge the class five rapids.

A more fitting name for Copper Hill might be Phoenix, but that name was already taken. No matter what hardships hit, the town continues to pick itself up, dust (or dry) itself off, and find another claim to fame. What other places can you name that have made an industry of straddling a state line?