Although most early settlers were farmers, day laborers secured jobs in various local industries before the close of Cherokee County's first decade. Elias Milton Kilpatrick, Sr. built and operated one of the first gristmills in Shoal Creek Civil District. His gristmill on Camp Creek had an undershot water-powered wheel. Millers were direly needed in this backwoods country to grind farmers' corn, wheat, and rye, and the gristmill business was profitable. Millers often employed helpers for arduous day-to-day tasks such as sacking and loading. Thus, young mill hands sometimes became apprentices.

Logging became the county's first major industry with the many waterways providing free and rapid transport of logs downstream to numerous sawmills. Water power was the most easily tapped and ready source of energy. Flumes for mining gold were built on several creeks. Goods and supplies were transferred in and out of the area via river rafts and flatboats, these being the most rapid and efficient modes then available.

Water was also used to power twelve-foot wheels that drove the iron forges, bloomery, and chaffery. Numerous iron works were built throughout the county beginning in the early 1850s. Iron was a commodity in great demand because it was used to make so many necessary products -- everything from a farmer's plow to a housewife's pot.

Fain's Bloomery Forge began operation on Owl Creek in the Hanging Dog section in 1854. Harmon Lovingood, a pioneer settler along Hanging Dog Creek, owned and also operated an iron forge in the community.

Another iron works called the Persimmon Creek Bloomery Forge was constructed on Persimmon Creek about twelve miles west of Murphy according to R. E. Barclay. He records that "about 45 tons of bar iron was made at this place in 1855."

About five miles west of the latter forge was another on Shoal Creek and named for this creek which powered the wheel. This forge near Kilpatrick's Turtletown Post Office was owned by John Jones who, according to Barclay, "was granted 3,000 acres of land, called the 'forge donation,' in consideration of his erecting the forge and manufacturing iron."

According to the 1850 U.S. Census Schedule, Cherokee County was thriving with the following tradesmen: 32 blacksmiths, 22 carpenters, 3 cabinet makers, 2 gunsmiths, 2 painters, 8 millers, 7 millwrights, 8 saddlers, 3 tailors, 5 tanners, 2 tinsmiths, and 7 wagon makers. In addition, it was home for each of the following individual workers: brickmason, chair maker, collier, cooper, distiller, hammerman, miner, and sawmiller. James Allen, who lived there by 1840, became the county's first hatter. He and his son William Allen plied that trade for decades. One of James Allen's handmade felt hats is displayed at Cherokee County Historical Museum located in Murphy.

Only a year after that census was enumerated, the village of Murphy was incorporated in 1851 as county seat and named for a prominent attorney in North Carolina, Archibald DeBow Murphey, known as the "father of education in North Carolina." Barclay noted that the e was an accidental omission in the official spelling and this error was never corrected. Murphy, formerly the site of Fort Butler, was strategically located for trade and transit at the confluence of the major waterways, Hiwassee and Valley Rivers.

Julius E. Raht's copper mining industry in Ducktown, Tennessee witnessed its heyday during the 1850s. Many Cherokee County farmers and young men relocated to Polk County, Tennessee for employment in the mines.

John Caldwell opened a road down the rugged Ocoee River Gorge from Ducktown to Cleveland, Tennessee in 1853, in order to transport copper to Cleveland railroad docks where it could be outbound to markets. A mail route was later established via this treacherously winding road. By 1854, wagon travel all the way from Cherokee County, North Carolina to Cleveland, Tennessee, a distance of over fifty miles, was possible for the first time when Caldwell's Old Copper Road became an official state road. Today, it remains the shortest land distance between the two points.

Barclay, R. E. Ducktown Back in Raht's Time. Cleveland, Tennessee: White Wing Publishing House, 1974.

Freel, Margaret Walker. Our Heritage the People of Cherokee County, North Carolina 1540-1955. Asheville, North Carolina: 1956.

God's Country. Murphy, North Carolina: Cherokee County Chamber of Commerce, 1982.

U.S. census reports of Cherokee County, North Carolina, 1840-1880.

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