Now for some history of the area.
Recently I visited the Burra Burra Mine Museum in Ducktown, Tennessee.
I bought a book there, and I'm attaching a few pages from it which deal with mid 19th century history of this area.
The book is It Happened In Tennessee, by Susan SAWYER, The Globe Pequot Press, 2002.
This website gives a pretty good history of some of the mining activities that went on, even though it only talks about one small area.
I was told that the federal government "owned" the land after the Cherokee removal via the trail of tears.
A land sale office supposedly existed in Cleveland Tennessee where mining companies could buy land from the federal government and record their claims.
There were neither land grants nor land patents, only land sales, according to a County Recorder office employee with whom I spoke recently.
Large companies bought up all the land holdings of smaller companies.
The Cities Service Company apparently owned tens of thousands of acres of land in several counties of south-east Tennessee.
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