Which China Grove houses actually justify copper
China Grove grew around milling and the 1903 roller mill still stands in the centre of it. The housing that surrounds it is small, close together and still occupied, with newer building at the edges. What that means for a gutter quote is unusual and worth saying plainly: the runs are short. A modest mill-town house may have sixty or seventy feet of roof edge in total, which puts the whole job below or barely at our minimum charge, and the per-foot rate stops being the number that matters.
Copper earns its place on some of that and not on the rest, and we would rather say which before quoting four to five times the aluminium rate. It belongs on genuine period property, where an aluminium K-style run across original eaves detailing is a visible compromise on a building that deserves better, and on architect-specified work where the metal is a deliberate part of the elevation. On modern subdivision housing it performs no better in any way that matters, because an under-drained copper gutter overflows exactly like an under-drained aluminium one. If the appeal is the look, painted aluminium half-round at $16 to $26 a foot gets most of the way there for roughly a third of the money.
Where copper is right, the specification decides everything. Copper is a noble metal and aluminium is not, so a copper gutter on aluminium hangers makes the hanger the actively corroding half of a galvanic cell, wet, every time it rains, for years. The gutter stays immaculate and the bracket wastes away, and in fifteen years the run comes off a house whose owner was expecting a lifetime. Copper or bronze hangers, copper or stainless fasteners, copper downspouts and straps, and soldered joints rather than sealant.
One check specific to the property rather than the town: copper runoff corrodes bare aluminium and galvanised steel below it, so anything downstream on the elevation (flashings, a porch roof, an existing downspout) gets looked at before we hang a foot of it.

What China Grove itself changes
What drops on these roofs
Established street planting around the older centre on small lots, so canopy sits close over the roofs even though the individual trees are not exceptional. The newer edges are open. Rowan County carries a mix of hardwood and pine similar to Lincoln County, and where pine sits over one of these smaller roofs it produces a disproportionate load relative to the amount of gutter available to hold it.
Getting to the gutters
Tight but low. Houses are close together on small lots with limited side clearance, so ladder positions on side elevations sometimes have to be worked out rather than simply chosen, but almost everything is single-storey or modest two-storey and nothing is at difficult height. Trailer access on the older streets can be constrained by on-street parking rather than by the properties themselves.