When Gold Was In the Hills
You can tell something big happened in Georgia. The dome of the Georgia State Capitol glints yellow in the sun—just one of the few state capitols in the nation to have a gilded dome, for instance.
Travel about 65 miles from Atlanta, north to where the places names give clues to the way things have been: Auraria and Dahlonega. While the true meaning of ‘Dahlonega’ is up for discussion, it is a variation of a Cherokee word that describes yellow or a valuable metal..
Many towns in the nation have their own knick-knack collection of facts. Dahlonega, the county seat of Lumpkin County, contains the oldest standing courthouse in the state.
But how many can boast that baked into their courthouse’s brick—brick that’s still standing today—there are flecks of gold?
These are the signs of an old glory in the hills of Northern Georgia, signs that, nestled in them thar hills lies the remnants of a real-life El Dorado.
It’s a fitting monument to the site of America’s first gold rush, where, 20 years before thousands trekked to California in hopes of striking it rich, a similar band of fortune-hunters gambled their fate in the Georgia clay.
Before it was known for its movies, its peanuts, peaches or “Gone with the Wind,” Georgia played a pivotal role in the development of the young America.
The Discovery
How this gold rush in Georgia started is up to some debate. But according to Sam McDuffie, site manager at the Dahlonega Gold Museum, there’s one story that the museum cites as starting it all.
“In 1828 a gentleman named Benjamin Parks was out in the woods deer hunting and he stumbled across a gold or a yellow rock while he was out there and he picked it up and sure enough it was gold,” McDuffie said.
Parks talked to the landowner. Could he lease the land and see what other treasures lay in its soil? The landowner, who doubted his land had much of any precious metal, agreed.
Parks made a fair bit prospecting the land. But then he stopped. He had 11 children to raise, and that took money. According to McDuffie, Parks was wont to compare gold mining with gambling—both had too much to do with luck.
Meanwhile, Park’s chance encounter with the precious metal changed the area in which he lived. Word got out. In the following year, 6,000 to 8,000 people rolled into town, an absolute explosion compared to the wilderness area it was before, McDuffie said.
In the beginning
This was not the first time that someone discovered gold in the United States. According to McDuffie, gold was also found in Villa Rica, a town to the west of Atlanta, and gold deposits were found in North Carolina. But Dahlonega was the first time that there was a rush in the United States to dig up the metal.
But how it got into North Georgia, well, that is a story with cosmic proportions.
As Richard Harris, who volunteers at Dahlonega Gold museum, will tell you, gold cannot be made on earth—contrary to the dreams of every alchemist of the Middle Ages. No, the retired astrophysicist said, gold is formed through the explosion of supernova stars.
“That’s the only place in the universe strong enough to push those atoms close enough together to where they bond and create heavy elements,” Harris explained. “That’s the only reason that we have elements heavier than iron.
The earth experienced a time of great impact, the late heavy bombardment, according to Harris. Meteors and comets began to bombard the speck in the solar system. The moon developed its craters at that time. Common elements like water filled the earth, and rarer finds like gold and uranium showered the planet.
It was the luck of Georgia that a golden meteor landed here, Harris suggests, exploding and littering the area with gold.
With gold on the ground, geology starts to explain how the gold became part of the North Georgia hills, Harris said.
The earth’s plate tectonics ground against each other, crushed the land and bent layers of rock into mountains.
“500 million years ago there was a large melt of magma that came up underneath the Appalachian Mountains. It’s filled the cracks in the crevices of the native rock… If you go and take a look at Stone Mountain, that’s left over from it. But it filled the cracks in the crevices of the rocks underneath north Georgia. And when they cooled and solidified … a lot of the veins were rich in silica and gold. And that’s the reason that the only place you find gold is in the quartz rocks here in Georgia.”
Over time, the rains beat down. Gold, one of the heaviest metals, eroded out from the mountains. But it did not travel far. It followed gravity and rested. Over time, the gold accumulated on the surface of the mountain as other, lighter rock was carried away.
It waited for somebody to find it.
Conflict
Over the years, the gold rush left Dahlonega with a fearsome reputation, though one that appears to be unfounded. Think the wild, wild west in the deep South. “The History of Lumpkin County for the First Hundred Years, 1832-1932” by Andrew Cain eloquently recorded the recollections of Miss Fanny Wood, who said the old tales were just not true.
“That old story about every rock in Auraria having been used to knock somebody in the head is not so. There was no more fighting there than in Dahlonega,” Woods is quoted as saying.
As for murder, there were only two that Wood remembered during her time in Dahlonega.
Still, gold makes people do strange things. The desire for gold-infused land of Dahlonega created a three-way conflict in the area, a conflict describes as “The Great Intrusion” in Cain’s book.
The Cherokee claimed the land as theirs. The State of Georgia laid claim to the gold-rich hills of the area. The federal government at the time thought it had a hand to play because of the treaties it made with the Cherokee. Meanwhile, according to the official history of Lumpkin County, the fortune hunters and prospectors viewed the yellow metal as free for the taking.
Federal troops descended into the area and began arresting people found prospecting.
Still, the area was facing massive booms. Auraria received its name in 1832 when it had a population of 500 and was still merely five months old.
People not intending to strike it rich felt the siren song of gold. “Missionaries were sometimes sent into the region by outside organizations; but these frequently forgot the sinner, left Satan to his own devices, laid aside their Bibles, and took up the gold pan in pursuit of the yellow mammon, the love of which is reputed to be the root of all evil,” the History of Lumpkin County states.
Meanwhile, the discovery of gold led to massive political shifts. For the Cherokee living in the area, it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Already, the Indians were waging a legal battle as to whether or not they could lay claim to their lands in northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee.
Supreme Court cases flipped flopped one way and then another.
But gold was in the ground, and white Americans descended into Indian territory to gather up claim and some of that precious metal.
But McDuffie argues that the Trail of Tears did not occur because of the Georgia Gold Rush. It might have accelerated the forced removal of the Cherokee from the hills of northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee, but what led federal troops to pull Indian families from their homes at gunpoint began long before residents noticed the yellow glimmer in Dahlonega’s hills.
The Trail of Tears began with the Yazoo Land Act of 1795, which cut up Georgia’s territory at the time. Previously it supposedly ran all the way to the Mississippi River.
A second treaty and agreement between Georgia and the federal government in 1802 gave incentive to push native Americans out of their long-held lands.
When the Trail of Tears eventually occurred, McDuffie said, the gold rush was in full swing.
The Cherokee sued Georgia to prevent the state from seizing its land. The U.S. Supreme Court at the time rule in favor of the Indian tribe, but then-President Andrew Jackson famously said “John Marshall (the chief justice at the time) has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”
Explosive Growth
Not everyone was in Lumpkin County to prospect. Like the people who made small fortunes off the people who sought for the gold in the California gold rush, so did people in Lumpkin County.
Look at the advertisements in The Western Herald, a paper in Auraria in 1833, mere years after the gold was discovered. The advertisements are not dissimilar to ads found in a modern hunting magazine or travel magazine. In one, a lawyer advertised his ability to sell land lots and another said it had gold land for sale.
Auraria’s newspaper also featured advertisements for gold maps and private assayers – people who determine the purity of gold.
The town was the place to be. As an example of the explosive growth of the area, just know that it went from being nary a soul to, in a few months, 1,800 people voting in a local election. Indeed, about 10,000 white men were in the area at the time.
But the gold rush did not just attract the young and restless. Former Vice President John Calhoun ended up in North Georgia following the siren song. According to the Lumpkin County history, he brought with him slaves that worked the mines for him. Others also used slave labor for mining.
Slaves were sold—along with land—on the steps of the courthouse.
Meanwhile, inside that gold-flaked courthouse, at least one grand jury was noting the declining morals of the area. In 1835, the jury was worried about the area’s “moral reputation,” citing the increase of tippling shops - what we might call bars today. This caused loitering – and on the Sabbath no less.
In the early years of the Gold Rush, miners relied on placer mining, McDuffie said.
Miners would head to the streams armed with a pan and shovel. It’s a technique still used today by people searching for gold. In those early days, the gold was essentially lying there for the picking.
Later on, they turned to dynamite to chase the vein of quartz—and the gold it contained—deeper into the ground.
One man from Tennessee created a diving bell so that miners could work at the bottom of deep water.
The end of mining
But as any good economist can tell you, the bubble cannot last. Word had gotten out that gold had been found in California. Miners, tired of scratching at Georgia clay, were packing up to head out.
Nonetheless, within 20 years or so, miners returned with new mining techniques, including hydraulic mining, which was later banned.
Miners would create reservoirs on top of mountains and, using water tracks up to 30 miles long, create enough water pressure to hose down mountains with hydraulic cannons.
Eventually, the state banned hydraulic mining because of its effect on the environment.
Large-scale mining didn’t end until World War II, McDuffie said. But people still come to Dahlonega in hopes of getting their hands on the coveted yellow metal.
They find plenty of gold in the area, but if someone pulls a big, gleaming nugget from a local stream, it’s not as well publicized, McDuffie said. People like to keep those sorts of things quiet.
Research suggests that 60 to 70 percent of the gold still lies deep in the Dahlonega hills.
“It was so difficult to get to,” McDuffie said, “and we didn’t want to blow the tops off of mountains and all that, to mess up the environment or anything like that. It’s so difficult to get to now that it almost wouldn’t pay for itself.”
It just goes to show that these mountains are worth their weight in gold.