Gold Fever

We and the Snyders slept in till almost 9 am.  Then John and Christie treated us to their favorite breakfast nook nearby.  We parted and they headed home to prepare for tomorrow’s horse show in Aiken, South Carolina, and we headed south for Rock Hill, SC.

As we often do, we started out on the freeway, but soon tired of the same view mile after mile and set the GPS to take us on mostly two lanes.  It was not long until we found a library, and a Goodwill to search for books in. Then we struck GOLD!

No.  We REALLY struck gold. For some reason this had never come up on our search of cool places to visit (OK. Cool to a history nerd like me). On County Road 200, north of the small town of Stanfield, is the site of the very, very FIRST discovery of gold anywhere on the North American continent.

Reed’s Gold Mine, located in the rolling Piedmont, among the Appalachian foothills, is where the 300 year old dream of Christopher Columbus, Hernando Desoto, and Yosemite Sam (OK. The last is a Warner Brothers cartoon guy… but he is a prospector in a couple of those silver screen shorts) came true.

Yes, right here in very rural, post revolutionary war North Carolina three small children, the progeny of Mr. and Mrs. John Reed, found a several pound nugget of almost pure gold simply lying in Little Meadow Creek while playing one Sunday.

  

John was a German who had enlisted as a mercenary Hessian soldier to fight for King George III in America and when he arrived in the south he deserted, went deep into Western North Carolina and squatted: Cleared some land in the woods and began to farm.  He married and years later, in 1799, their three kids found the gold.

But none of them knew it was gold.  He told his son to use it as a door stop in their log frame cabin.  Time passed, and someone convinced him to find out what it was.  He took it to a jeweler in a nearby town and the rest is history.  Except that you might not know the jeweler offered to pay him ANY price he would name for it and he named $3.50.  Many times less than what the jeweler would get for it melted down into an ingot.

But John was a unique man.  He was a deeply believing biblical Christian and he felt that any reward not worked hard for would bring suffering and hurt (‘Ye shall earn your bread by the sweat of your brow’).  So he was simply glad to be rid of it.  But the town and towns elsewhere began to share the story of the gold in 

                                                                                          Little Meadow Creek in 

                                                                                          Western North Carolina.

  

John’s children, and other relatives, convinced him to buy more surrounding land, and allow them to start working it but to his dying day he focused on farming and let the kinfolk pan and dig for gold.  And they found it.

Then one day a large nugget was found that the family began to fight over.  REALLY fight over.  And John went to town on his own and had a judge officially shut down the entire Reed Gold Business.  He said he’d been right, and the easy (well, easier than farming, I guess) money was ruining them all. But some years later the family opened up the works again, for many others now were coming into the region and extracting tons of gold and getting rich.

The gold was still pouring out of the NC hills when the larger excitement of the California Gold Rush hit the world.  But even after the Civil War started gold was still coming out of these hills till the South could afford no energy or manpower for anything but war.  And the gold was getting harder to find.  Now you had to dig for it, through hard volcanic rock.

  

The streams were played out and it took big investment to get the deep mines dug. After the war and right into the 1960’s less gold, but some,  has been taken out of these beautiful North Carolina Hills, and Southern Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia; any where the Piedmont is there has been gold, silver, zinc, sulphur, and other precious or useful metals and minerals mined.

In the 1970’s the state of North Carolina made the Reed Gold Mine an official Historic Park. It and several other mines of the area tell the story that began when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, three small children found a pretty rock, and… some of these old mines are being re-opened now that gold is so high in value.  Who knows; another gold rush just may be in the future for Western North Carolina. Hey, there are old gold mines under much of downtown Charlotte, North Carolina.  Wouldn’t it be something if…

After spending almost two months in the mountains of Colorado, much of that time learning about that state's own late 19th century gold and silver rushes I found there was still plenty to learn about gold fever.  For instance, did you know mercury was a prime tool used in the separation of gold from other materials like quartz?  And the miners soon learned that mercury poisoning drives men mad.

Remember the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland?  hatters in England were using mercury to turn old beaver hats into new and voila'! Mad hatters were actually turning up on some London Streets.

And this truly well done tour of the reed underground mine and the open mines and placer mining of these streams of the last 200 years is very well done here, and it is FREE.

You just never know what you'll find when you get off the highway and onto the back roads of America.

-Ken