Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Copperopolis, CA

Copperopolis is an unincorporated town and census-designated place in Calaveras County, in the Sierra Nevada foothills along State Route 4, and it is registered as California Historical Landmark #296.

Unlike almost every other Mother Lode town in Calaveras County, Copperopolis' claim to fame is copper, not gold — it was founded in 1860 by William K. Reed, Dr. Allen Blatchly, and Thomas McCarty at the site of the region's second major copper ore discovery.

Reed and McCarty founded the Union Copper Mine, later joined by the Keystone and Empire mines, and in 1862 Reed built a toll road known as Reeds Turnpike from Copperopolis through Telegraph City toward Stockton.

Copperopolis boomed during the Civil War, when the Union desperately needed copper; its ore was hauled to Stockton and San Francisco, then shipped around Cape Horn to smelters on the East Coast.

After the Civil War the mines closed as shipping costs soared, but a Boston company revived them in the 1880s and production boomed again during both World Wars, until the mines finally closed in 1946.

By the time mining ended, the Copperopolis mines had produced 72,598,883 pounds of copper worth over $12 million at the time, according to the U.S. Bureau of Mines — and no copper has been mined there since.

Copperopolis got its first post office in 1861, and four of its buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places: the Copperopolis Armory, the Copperopolis Congregational Church, the Honigsberger Store, and Reed's Store.

Copperopolis had a population of 3,400 at the 2020 census, down from 3,671 in 2010, spread across about 15.6 square miles of foothill country.

Copperopolis has about 1,399 households with an average household size of 2.43 people, roughly 81% of occupied homes are owner-occupied, and the median age is 51.1 years — a distinctly retirement-leaning community.

Copperopolis has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate with hot, dry summers — no rain at all in a typical July and August — and only about 0.2 inches of snow in an average year.