History of Gold
When the subject of gold rushes comes up, the first words to mind are often
“49ers” or “Klondike”. Yet the first gold discovery resulting in a gold rush, took
place some 50 years before the 1849 migration to California.
It wasn’t even a gold rush. It was a 12 year-old boy picking up a heavy hunk of
yellow metal along Little Meadow Creek, in North Carolina. Conrad John Reed,
the son of a British soldier who had deserted the cause of Britain, unwittingly
started a chain of events that would have long reaching consequences for his
family, his state and his country.

The yellow hunk served as a doorstop in the Reed home until 1802, when Reed’
s father learned it was gold. He sold it to a Fayetteville jeweller for $3.50. It was
worth thousands.

Reed began “prospecting” along and in the stream, with three other partners
who put up capital in the form of money and labour. The “mine” operated only
when there wasn’t farm work for the miners, who for the most part, were slaves
belonging to the partners. In 1803, one of the slaves would stumble across a
nugget weighing 28 lbs. Their speed of production picked up, with a still erected
in 1806, to employ mercury in the recovery of the gold. Soon, neighbours and
people in surrounding counties were mining their properties too, some with
notable success.

Sinking shafts to tap the gold rich quartz, began in the 1820s, but didn’t arrive at
the Reed holdings until 1831. Reed himself still held the property and the upper
hand in 1834 when a new agreement was struck whereby his sons and sons-in-
law would provide the labour, yielding one third of the profits to Reed, and two
thirds to his partners. But a dispute over a 13 lb nugget discovered in 1835
would drag on for ten years, and the mine would not be fully exploited.

Reed died in 1845, the property passing to a grandson and son-in-law, who sold
it shortly thereafter. The fortunes of the mine would rise and fall on several
occasions over the next hundred years, before it closed forever as a
commercial venture, in the 1930s.

A second gold rush on the East Coast, also pre-dates the California find. In 1828,
near Dahlonega, Georgia, Benjamin Parks stumbled over a yellow rock while
deer hunting. The rock turned out to be full of gold. In no time at all, 15,000
people rushed to the area to share in the bonanza.

Gold was literally lying around on the ground, having worked up from
underground seams on the mountain, and been washed down over hundreds of
years. The first prospectors picked it off the surface, and out of the streams,
stripping the easily reachable deposits. Next came digging deeper in the
streams, but their only equipment at the time was the gold pan. Soon they began
carrying baskets of material down off the mountain, to be cleaned in sluice
boxes. The sluices were simply long troughs with a ladder like formation in the
middle, operating on the force of gravity, as water poured into the boxes, and
washed the contents down over the ladder, where heavy deposits such as gold
would drop into the bottom of the box, and the light particles would wash on out
of the sluice. The deposits would then be panned for gold.

Work was slow until 1845, when Nathan Hand came up with a system that utilized
26 miles of sluice boxes and pipe for the hydraulic blasting of water at the upper
part of the mountain, which washed the dirt down into the waiting sluice boxes.
After hard rock was reached in 1880, it was determined that the foundation of
the gold find was not a vein of gold in the mountain, but veins of quartz
containing gold. The average quartz/gold vein runs two to three inches thick,
with the odd lucky strike being eight inches wide. A man named Knight, mining
on the Dahlonega side of the mountain, discovered several small veins running
into one, that measured an incredible 22 feet in depth, one of the largest veins
of gold bearing quartz ever found in the world. Reportedly one of the first every
systematic attempts at deep vein mining, the site was abandoned finally in 1906.