Up From the Mines in Tennessee - New York Times

(article continues from prior posting)

In July 2007, Penney Farlow, 46, and her husband, Jim, 49, of Blue Ridge, paid $48,500 for a rundown three-bedroom Copperhill bungalow, a place where they say they might one day retire. “With the train coming in from Blue Ridge, Copperhill might become the perfect place for an artists’ colony,” she said. “Every year more and more people are on the Ocoee. I keep thinking that for those who come to bike or raft, how much fun it would be to finish your day, clean up and be able to walk right down to the little pub and restaurant and hang out downtown. I hope we’re right.”
In May of 2002, Richard Scott, 54, gave up a job as a news director for a Philadelphia radio station after finding a turnkey cabin rental business on nine acres with four cabins, a live-in two-bedroom, two-bath log home, a lake and a stream. “I paid what a three-bedroom house would have cost me in Cherry Hill, N.J. We sit outside and watch bear, deer and foxes.”
Ms. Beaver, a former accountant who is now widowed, has made it her mission to resurrect the long-derelict hilltop cemetery where her grandparents and the Copper Basin’s founders are buried. But she expressed a sense of loss and hope common to many of her peers.
“To some old-timers, Copperhill’s now a foreign place,” she said “I was talking to another lady who grew up here about how we used to get out and sweep our yards a certain way to keep them neat and clean because we didn’t have grass. And I took a tour of the mine in the summer, which made me just a little bit sad. Those red hills, that was our history. Now it’s all green with kudzu and trees. But I’m glad I came back. I’d love to see this become a thriving place. I’d like to see kids grow up here and not have to leave to make a living. I think it can happen. I really do.”