Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Ducktown, TN

Ducktown is a small incorporated city in Polk County in far southeastern Tennessee, near where Tennessee meets Georgia and North Carolina.

The city takes its name from the Cherokee village of Gawonvyi, meaning "duck place," which stood near the confluence of the Ocoee River and Tumbling Creek; the name was recorded as "Ducktown" on Cherokee annuity rolls in 1799, and tradition credits a Cherokee leader called Chief Duck.

Ducktown sits at the center of the Copper Basin, also called the Ducktown Basin, a broad valley in the southern Appalachian Mountains.

Native copper was discovered near Ducktown in 1843, and the first shipment of copper ore was packed out of the basin on muleback in 1847.

The Ducktown district was a major copper-mining center from 1847 until 1987, also producing iron, sulfur, and zinc as byproducts.

The district's first smelter was built in 1854, a year after a road connected the basin with Cleveland, Tennessee, and mining paused when Union troops destroyed the refinery at Cleveland in 1863 before resuming in 1866.

Sulfur fumes from open smelting destroyed the vegetation across the basin and left eroded hillsides; by 1906 the Tennessee Copper Company had begun recovering the sulfur as sulfuric acid instead of releasing it into the air.

The Ducktown Basin Museum, located on the site of the Burra Burra Mine in Ducktown, chronicles the geology and mining history of the basin.

Although the community dates to the 1840s, Ducktown was not incorporated as a city until 1951.

The 2020 census counted 461 residents and 188 households in Ducktown, with a median age of 56.3 years and about 39 percent of residents aged 65 or older.