Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Orme, TN

Orme is an incorporated town in Marion County, Tennessee, filling the northern, Tennessee end of Doran's Cove, a narrow valley enclosed on three sides by the Cumberland Plateau.

Orme began in the early 1890s as Needmore, a coal-mining community where the first coal was dug from the mountainsides around Doran's Cove about 1892.

In the late 1890s, Chattanooga businessman Frederick Gates bought the Needmore mining operations and persuaded the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway to build a branch line into the remote valley, which was completed in 1902.

Gates sold the operation to Richard Orme Campbell, who renamed it the Campbell Coal and Coke Company and renamed the town Orme after his son; 'Orme' was the maiden name of the elder Campbell's mother, Virginia Orme.

Orme was incorporated in 1902, the same year its first coal hit the market in September; its post office had opened in 1892 under the Needmore name before taking the Orme name.

Campbell built a commissary, company offices, workers' cottages, schools, and a hotel at Orme, and within a few years the booming coal town had grown to several thousand residents.

After Campbell sold out in 1905, the new owners' Battle Creek Coal and Coke Company worked four drift mines at Orme that at their peak shipped about 1,000 tons of coal a day out of the valley.

A miners' strike in 1939 shut down major mining operations at Orme and the rails were later removed for the World War II effort; afterward the hotel closed in 1945, the school in 1961, and the post office in 1970, though the wooden railroad depot still survives from the mining heyday.

The 2020 census counted just 87 residents in Orme, down from 126 in 2010, making it one of the smallest incorporated towns in Tennessee.

At the 2000 census, Orme's 124 residents lived in 57 households, 36 of them families.