Gold is Where You Find It: Placer Mining in North Carolina, 1799-1849

Abstract

The accidental discovery of a seventeen-pound gold nugget by a trio of adolescents in Cabarrus County, North Carolina in 1799 spurred a fitful gold rush that spread throughout the southeastern United States. From the early 1800s to 1849 the search for the precious metal fomented exploration and various industries along the gold-bearing regions of the Piedmont and eastern Appalachian Mountains from Alabama to Maryland. The focus of the nascent gold industry was off-season, haphazard placer mining by individuals and small family groups who used primitive medieval mining techniques and backbreaking physical labor. By the 1820s, the part-time, untrained farmers, slaves, and "boomers" had depleted the easily found nuggets and lodes in the "branch" streams. New techniques and innovations in machinery were developed by a set of diverse, yet interconnected, events and individuals to bring forth the golden metal. Thus, the gold fields of the Southeastern United States were a proving ground for the placer mining techniques and technology that fostered economic and industrial expansion in the agriculturally dominated region, as well as substantially contributing to the wealth of the new nation. This fifty-year period of placer mining innovation and practical application in the Southern gold fields provided the skills and basic equipment that promoted the whirlwind of mining frenzy that was the 1849 California Gold Rush.