Tag: georgia

Exploring Beaufort: A Cyclist’s Paradise in South Carolina

March 24,2025


We drove south to leave the winter of Ottawa, even though we enjoy snowshoeing. Escaping springtime offers a welcome reprieve from the winter’s cold and snow. Despite my pollen allergies (managed by Claritin), late March in the Carolinas offers ideal cycling weather.

Driving south towards Beaufort, South Carolina, I sighed in relief at leaving the crowded, monotonous, and speedy Interstate 95 behind. Driving for hours had numbed my feet, so I hoped for less, slower traffic on Route 21 East. Although slower, the traffic picked up closer to Beaufort on a four-lane highway.


The expansion of military bases (Parris Island and Beaufort), resort construction (Hilton Head Island), and a Northern retiree influx have driven development along South Carolina’s east coast.
We learned from a hotel employee at check-in that Beaufort’s population has almost doubled since the pandemic, nearing 15,000. It is not only retirees but also people working remotely who have arrived to take advantage of lower housing and living costs.

When Kathy stayed here thirty years ago, she stayed in one of the huge antebellum houses on the waterfront, used as a B&B in those days. Today, developers meticulously redeveloped the waterfront, and they restored the antebellum homes along the waterfront to their original designs. The city designated the downtown area a historic district, and we enjoyed a quiet walk admiring the architecture.

Cycling the Spanish Moss Trail from Beaufort to Port Royal was a smooth ride (it follows the old Magnolia rail line). The paved, twelve-foot-wide trail was flat, crossing marshes with many boardwalks and with the temperature in the mid-twenties (in the seventies in Fahrenheit), was ideal for a bike ride. Much of the Trail crossed areas with oak trees from which Spanish moss hung. I assume the source of the name for the Trail. Although the hanging moss is attractive, avoid touching it because it might contain chiggers.

The paved trail was great for riding, but I knew that falling off the bike would be rough, experiencing injury if going at the maximum allowed speed of 15 mph.

We sped through the twelve-mile trail, pausing to talk with people going in the opposite direction. We avoided talking about politics. We did not know how local people would react to talking to us Canadians, in view of Trump’s desire to annex Canada.

I noticed different organizations took responsibility for maintaining sections of the trail, which included benches at viewing sites, including the military that were in abundance in the area.

In less than a couple of hours, we arrived at Port Royal, at the other end of the trail. We were ready for a cup of coffee and found in the center of Port Royal a home converted to a restaurant with a name Corner Perk that offered fancy coffees. Their muffins were so special we couldn’t resist.

Next, we saw a sign for the Cyprus Wetlands rookery, home to hundreds of local birds (egrets, cormorants, bats, herons, etc.), right by the coffee shop. A boardwalk crosses a lake, going by an island with small trees that provide nesting grounds for birds. We noticed many turtles and alligators also slept on the shore of the island.

Returning to Port Royal, we found a small house converted to a restaurant boasting a sign for Griddle and Grits and the menu included grits with shrimp, with chorizo and grits with different ingredients. I like spicy foods and chose chorizo on grits, which turned out to be excellent. Kathy chose she crab soup, which also turned out to be a good choice.

On the return journey, we paused on a bench and were approached by a man who looked like a bear of an angler, who sat down, smoked a cigarette and started a conversation. He wanted to know all about us and then described his entire life story, including where he was born, where his family members were born and all the ailments they each had. I gathered he has been a floater with jobs in many states before settling in Beaufort. We could not resist listening to him; overall, it was an enjoyable social engagement.

We stopped at a Publix grocery store on the way home to pick up dinner. The Spanish Moss Trail is a nice, paved trail, but it was a bit too tame for us. We like longer and wilder trails with fewer refinements.

A Slice of America, where Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina Meet

June 2, 2022

Sometimes one drives through a small geographic area and discovers its small towns have a rich history. One such area we encountered is where the states of Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina meet. The area experienced the expulsion of the Cherokee Nation from their ancestral lands, the discovery of copper, the development of a company town mining copper, and the destruction of the environment leading to remediation. These have been major historical events. So how did we get there?

My daughter rented a vacation home in Murphy, North Carolina. The area is famous for hiking, walking, rafting, and mountain biking and daughter Megan and family wanted to enjoy these activities. The rental home was so big that we were all invited, though I left rafting and mountain biking for the younger generation. But l discovered other places to visit that interested me: the Cherokee Museum in Murphy, NC, and the Ducktown Copper Museum in Ducktown, TN.

The vacation home we drove to in western North Carolina (on the Tennessee border and a couple of hours from Atlanta, GA), was hugging the hill, almost sliding down, with huge picture windows facing the mountains and trees pruned in front to enhance the view. We took a serpentine road to access the vacation home, which was more like a mansion, with huge rooms and many bathrooms. It was difficult to turn the car around at the entrance to the home. But to go down the driveway, we had to turn around the car: it would have been impossible to back down the steep, curvy, and narrow laneway.

Murphy, NC (population 1600 in 2020), was a few minutes away from our vacation home, and housed the Cherokee County Museum, with panels describing the Trail of Tears, the 800-mile trek the Cherokees took after President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, pushing the Indians out of their ancestral lands onto federal territory (now Oklahoma). Some people called it ethnic cleansing in response to the settlers’ demand to take away the Cherokees’ land for their use. Over 4,000 Cherokees, about a quarter of the Cherokee Nation’s people perished on the trek.

We believe in Canada we were cruel to our native population by taking their children away from their families by force, to educate them in residential schools into our culture. In the US, the government chased them out of their native lands by force and put them into camps until all of them were cleared out of their ancestral territory. 

On leaving the Museum, I asked the receptionist if they employ any Cherokees. I would not have known if she was Cherokee and was simply curious.  She responded obliquely by saying that the Museum sells native crafts made by Cherokees. She may have misunderstood my question. To me, it seemed to make sense that in a museum dedicated to Cherokee history, they would employ people of Cherokee heritage. But then I remembered that the government chased all the natives out of their territory; perhaps there were no Cherokees left in this area. 

Then we saw the Ducktown Copper Museum. Ducktown, TN (population 560 in 2020) was a ten-minute drive from our rent, named after the Cherokee Chief, whose Cherokee name translated to Duck. (called Duck), in their native language. The Ducktown Mining Museum occupies the old headquarters of the Tennessee Copper Company (TCC). Our guide was a white-haired woman, a native of Ducktown – whose husband, brother, and father had all worked in the mines. She said that people started working for TCC as young as thirteen years of age and stayed with the company all their lives. 

TCC had a good reputation for labor relations, and was good to its employees, she said, although I found that there were strikes by the workers demanding higher wages and benefits.  When I asked, she confirmed the strikes but was proud of the company and showed us around explaining how copper was mined at a depth of twenty-five hundred feet. She said that she went down into the tunnels with her husband. I found it surprising to hear from her that the elevator could go down to the bottom of the mine in a couple of minutes; it must have been fast. 

Our guide also described how Ducktown had become the center of mining for copper, after a European American panning for gold in 1943, found copper instead. A copper rush resulted. In a couple of decades, over thirty companies explored and produced copper. Berra Berra Copper Company was the biggest mine at that time headed by a German-born mining engineer, Julius Raht. The company had expanded when roads were built to transport the ore.

During the American Civil War, the Confederates took over the Berra Berra Copper Company, the largest copper mine, and used its production for ninety percent of their needs for copper during the war effort.

But there were environmental impacts. The smelters built to separate the copper from the rock needed fire, and the logging for timber used to fire up the smelters denuded the entire landscape.

The constant burning spewed sulfuric gas into the air which, when mixed with water vapor in the atmosphere, became sulfuric acid and came down as acid rain, ruining all the vegetation and further resulting in topsoil erosion. The acid rain killed aquatic life as well in the Ocoee River. The entire area of sixty square miles had become a moonscape, visible by satellite imagery from the sky. 

But the mines created upwards of 2500 jobs and a booming economy and the environmental degradation had been ignored. To reduce the impact of acid rain, the mining companies erected tall chimneys, hoping for the dispersion of sulfates, only resulting in the dispersion of sulfites in a larger area.

The farmers in close-by Georgia suffered as a consequence of the acid rain and the Government of Georgia, on behalf of the farmers, sued the Tennessee Copper Company (TCC) for damages, in the early twentieth century. The lawsuit ended up with the US Supreme Court, which agreed with the plaintiff and called for an injunction to stop the operation of the mine, which was never enforced because the TCC started collecting the sulfuric acid and selling it as a byproduct of the copper mining process. 

In the early twentieth century, the TCC acquired many of the smaller copper companies and ran a store where the employees purchased all their requirements, and the store deducted the cost of their purchases from their wages. Often, employees developed a large debt that they could not repay and were forced to keep on working for the company. The guide explained that the company provided housing and clothing for the employees as well. I was wondering what life felt like in a company town, where the company ran everything.

With copper prices dropping, all the mines finished operating in 1987. By that time environmental remediation had been going on by the State of Tennessee, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and others. The guide said that although many million trees have already been planted, some moon-like areas were left intact for people to see what the landscape looked like during mining operations. 

I found it interesting to discover that even small places that are drive-throughs for most people, have unique histories, once you scratch the surface. While Murphy was, at one time, the center of the Cherokee Nation, it is now devoid of Cherokee people, except for a Museum dedicated to the Cherokees. And Ducktown, once a booming mining town with thousands of people, has shrunk to a few hundred people, having only a museum commemorating the once huge copper mining operation.