Toccoa and Ocoee River

One river, two names

The river rises in Union County, Georgia, where Canada and Mauldin creeks come together at about 2,120 feet. As the Toccoa it runs north and west for about 56 miles, through Blue Ridge Lake and Fannin County, to the state line, where McCaysville, Georgia, and Copperhill, Tennessee, face each other across it. On the Tennessee side it is the Ocoee. It crosses Polk County through a gorge, with the Big Frog Wilderness on one side and Little Frog on the other, and enters the Hiwassee near Benton at about 750 feet. Big Frog borders the Cohutta Wilderness in Georgia. Wikipedia gives the whole river about 93 miles, the only total we found. It derives Ocoee from the Cherokee name for the purple passionflower, and Toccoa from a word meaning “Catawba place.”

Blue Ridge Lake

TVA dates Blue Ridge Dam to 1925 through 1930. It is 175 feet high and 1,553 feet across, and the lake behind it runs eleven miles back up the valley and drops about 22 feet between summer and winter to make room for floods. Wikipedia gives it about 3,300 acres. TVA lowered the lake in 2010 to repair the penstock and shore up the dam, then held it low through the summer of 2012 after the ground moved unexpectedly that March. Below the dam TVA calls the Toccoa a Class I and II float when the turbine is running.

The Copper Basin

Copper was found at Ducktown, Tennessee, in 1843. Between 1865 and 1878, by the Tennessee Encyclopedia’s count, the mines yielded more than 24 million pounds of copper, and about fifty square miles of timber went for mine building and smelter fuel. The EPA describes ore roasters whose sulfur dioxide killed what vegetation was left, and roughly fifty square miles of Polk County, Tennessee, and Fannin County, Georgia, stripped bare. In 1907, after Georgia farmers sued, the company began turning its furnace gases into sulfuric acid. Mining in the basin ended in 1987.

The EPA says reforestation only succeeded in the 1980s. The water took longer. Davis Mill Creek carries about one percent of the Ocoee’s flow and is still the largest single source of its acid and metals, at a pH between 2.5 and 3.5 before treatment. Contaminated sediment reaches about 25 miles downstream, and a survey in the 1970s found one organism below the mines. A lime plant now raises the creek’s discharge from pH 3.3 to 7.0, and the EPA reports aquatic life slowly coming back.

Dams, flume and the Olympic course

The Ocoee’s three dams are numbered from the bottom. The Eastern Tennessee Power Company built No. 1, 135 feet high, at Parksville in 1911, and No. 2 upstream in 1912 by TVA’s history or 1913 by the Tennessee Historical Commission’s. No. 2 is a timber crib filled with stone, about 30 feet high. It turns the river into a wooden flume on a shelf cut along the gorge wall, nearly five miles long by TVA’s figure, which falls 19 feet while the river below falls 270, so the water reaches the powerhouse about 250 feet above it. TVA acquired both dams in 1939 and finished No. 3 in 1943 for wartime industry, sending the river through another pipeline about two and a half miles long. Wikipedia says the ten-mile middle stretch below No. 2 is often close to dry. For much of the year the middle Ocoee’s whitewater is in a wooden box on the side of a mountain.

In 1976 the flume was shut down, after a rock slide that September by Wikipedia’s account and because it could no longer carry its maintenance track by TVA’s. While it was down the river ran in its own bed, and paddlers and outfitters found it. Preservationists fought to keep the flume, got it federally listed as a historic place, and TVA rebuilt it in treated wood by 1983. The paddlers formed the Ocoee River Council to keep the water coming, and after a long fight, which Wikipedia says took an act of Congress, TVA agreed to scheduled releases. The middle river now runs most weekends from March through October.

The upper river below No. 3 held the whitewater slalom of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. TVA built a model of a stretch of the river in 1993 to help the Forest Service design the course. The Forest Service’s Ocoee Whitewater Center, built for the Games, burned on April 26, 2022, and officials called it a complete loss. The traffic has a cost on the bank as well. Ruth’s golden aster, an endangered plant known only from short stretches of this river and the Hiwassee, grows in cracks in the riverside rock, and the Fish and Wildlife Service still counts trampling by whitewater visitors among its threats on the Ocoee.