Julius Eckhardt Raht

[2] Raht worked for short periods in Missouri, Dubuque, Iowa, and Wisconsin before taking charge of mining at Harpers Ferry, Leesburg, and Jamestown, Virginia, and Guilford County, North Carolina.

[3] By 1854, he decided that the best opportunity to make his fortune lay in the copper mining industry near Ducktown, Tennessee, in the extreme southeastern corner of the state.

[4] As his biographer has written, Raht was "spirited, methodical, ambitious, honest...no less a stern taskmaster in his own behalf than he was a loyal employee of those in whose interests he served."

He founded the Cleveland National Bank and became manager of the Ocoee Turnpike and Plank Road Co., a transportation route needed to move copper to the nearest railroad.

He made his fortune legally by running a commissary business to supply food and sundries to the miners, and then by making shrewd investments of his profits throughout Ducktown and eastern Tennessee.