Blood & Biohazard Cleanup Near Duke Murphy, NC

Murphy is a town in and the county seat of Cherokee County, North Carolina, and is the westernmost county seat in the state, roughly 360 miles from the state capital in Raleigh.

Murphy sits at the confluence of the Hiwassee and Valley rivers in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The Cherokee knew the site of Murphy as Tlanusi-yi, 'the Leech Place,' from a legend about a giant leech named Tlanusi said to live in the river there.

The old Cherokee Trading Path, later the Unicoi Turnpike and today the Joe Brown Highway, passed through the site of Murphy.

The settlement was first called Huntington, after Colonel A. R. S. Hunter's trading post and post office, before being renamed for North Carolina politician Archibald Murphey.

In 1836, during the Cherokee removal known as the Trail of Tears, the U.S. Army built Fort Butler at Murphy as the main collection point for Cherokee east of the mountains, from which they were marched over the Unicoi Turnpike to Fort Cass in Tennessee.

Cherokee County was formed in 1839 from part of Macon County, and Murphy was incorporated as its county seat in 1851.

Harshaw Chapel, constructed in 1869, is the oldest surviving building in Murphy.

The Cherokee County Courthouse in downtown Murphy, built in 1927 in the Beaux-Arts style and faced with locally sourced blue marble, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The 2020 census counted 1,608 people in Murphy.