There's Gold in Them Hills! Mining the Appalachians
In the fall of 1828, Appalachian farmer Benjamin Parks was taking a stroll through the hardwoods outside his homestead. As he walked along, he looked up at the beautiful mountain trees, watching the crisp leaves float liltingly through the cool air to the forest floor. With his eyes trained upward, he was unaware of where he was walking. Suddenly, his foot caught on something large and heavy, and he tumbled to the ground, landing with a thud. As he stood up and brushed himself off, he searched his surroundings for the culprit. A large rock sat proudly in the dirt and the leaves, shimmering slightly in the fractals of sunlight between the large trees around it. Parks bent down to look at the stone, in awe of his lucky find. Benjamin Parks had tripped over a mineral composite filled with tiny flakes and nuggets of Appalachian gold!
This story is one of many myths and legends of the start of Georgia’s gold rush, some people say that a man enslaved on one of Georgia’s Appalachian homesteads found the first piece of gold, others say a member of Cherokee Nation found it. No matter how the story is told, however; the ending is the same. Word of gold in the Appalachians spread like wildfire through the surrounding towns and cities, and thousands of families made their way into the mountain, thirsty for the gold and the vast wealth it promised. By 1830, over 10,000 prospectors had settled in North Georgia, despite the fact that it was still treaty-protected Cherokee land.
As prospectors began digging up the Cherokee land by the Yahoola River (now Yahoola Creek), state legislature moved quickly to secure the interest of the settlers. As the state declared control over Cherokee land within Georgia boundaries, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act which promised to force all indigenous people from the state, which directly violated the Treaty of Hopewell signed in 1785. Two Supreme Court cases, Cherokee v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832) interceded on behalf of the Cherokee as a sovereign nation within America. Both of these cases proved unsuccessful as President Andrew Jackson encouraged the removal of all native people, holding firm in his support of both Congress and the state of Georgia.
In 1835, the Treaty of New Echota was signed without the authority of the Cherokee government and their Principal Chief John Ross. The treaty stated that all indigenous people were to exchange their lands for a parcel of land in “Indian Territory” in modern-day Oklahoma. By 1838, President Martin Van Buren ordered the official removal of the native people. This resulted in the infamous
“Trail of Tears”, which claimed the lives of thousands due to disease, starvation, and exposure.
Even before the Cherokee were forced from their homes, the state of Georgia had been auctioning off plots of land in the “gold lottery”. Any white man or white widowed woman could purchase either a 160-acre agricultural lot or a 40-acre mining tract within the gold belt of the Appalachians. Over 133,000 Georgia residents registered for the 35,000 plots of land in the lottery.
The very first gold miners in North Georgia kept their search simple, seeking only surface gold that had eroded from underground “lodes”. They used a variety of tools, including pans, picks, shovels, and rockers. Pans and rockers utilized water to uncover little nuggets and flakes of gold. Yards of soil were tilled up and shoveled into rockers filled with water. There would be a mesh catch in the large, oblong wooden vessel that would separate the dirt from the heavier gold within it. Pans were used to scoop up the sediments of river beds. The inside walls of the pan were rippled, acting as a smaller version of a rocker catch. Before long, prospectors began to dig straight to the underground lodes, beginning the vein-mining era. Panning for gold was a thing of the past, as newer mining technology grew with the greed of the settlers.
The life of an Appalachian gold miner was a tough one. They built their own houses, and lived almost completely off the land. They spared no moments away from mining, not even to bathe. A correspondent for Knickerbocker Magazine traveled to a new spring-up town called Aurelia in the Appalachians to write an article on mining life. The correspondent described the Appalachian miners as “unkempt, ignorant, and uncivilized”. The life of a gold miner was not for the faint of heart, and yet thousands of people flocked to Aurelia in hopes of getting their hands on the gold that was sending so many people into a frenzy.
Not long after Aurelia was featured in the news, the town of Dahlonega was named Lumpkin County Seat. As the citizens of Aurelia flocked to the bigger and more successful town, the population of the hardy little town tanked. By 1834, many houses had been built in Dahlonega, Georgia. A courthouse was finished in 1836, officially putting Dahlonega on the map.
As the mining industry grew, the cost of mining increased. Slave labor was heavily relied upon in the Appalachian mines, especially in the colder months when the cotton industry slowed down. With the rise of the industry, many investors from the North migrated to Georgia with new mining technology. Double-catch rockers
picked up the slack from the new piping and tubing running from the Yahoola River to the nearby stamp mills, which introduced hydraulic mining to the mountains. Dredge boats now made their way through the rivers and tributaries, sloughing sediment off the bottom of the river to be piped into stamp mills.
By 1840, Georgia’s gold was severely depleted, at least given the technology of that time. Meanwhile, California boasted a gold rush of her own, luring in nearly all of the discouraged Appalachian miners. The once-pristine mountains were left in peace for a few years, before the overpopulation of California pushed prospectors back to the South. New Californian technology was introduced in the mountains, and the Georgia gold rush was back on.
The latest Georgia gold rush carried on until the start of the Civil War in 1864, which disrupted many mining areas. Prospectors and investors fled from the warzone, leaving mines and tunnels through every mountain in the range, and leaving the once vibrant, flowing rivers nothing more than trickling creeks.
Luckily, the Appalachians have almost fully recovered from the gold rush, and today serves as a home to much wildlife and natural beauties. Hikers, campers, and tourists still flock to the mountains for solitude, history, and intriguing caving expeditions through the old mineshafts. What once was a land full of gold is now a land full of a different variety of riches- the riches of quiet nature, family fun, and the occasional sparkle in a healing riverbed.