GoldPaq

The Gold Rush of the 19th century may be long past, but gold is still found in the United States. Ranking third behind South Africa and Australia, the U.S is one of the world’s top producers of gold.

Most of today’s U.S. production of gold comes from the West, but at one time, most every region in the United States had gold mines. The biggest gold-producing region, for years, was the South.

Gold has been found in many of the states in the southern part of the United States. During the early to mid 19th century, much of the gold produced in the U.S. came from the south. In fact, the first U.S. Gold rush occurred not in the west, but in the south.

North Carolina was the site of the first American gold rush. In 1799, gold was found in the Piedmont region by a 12 year old boy, who happened upon a 17 pound gold nugget in a creek on his family’s farm. During the gold mining phase in North Carolina, approximately 1.2 million troy ounces of gold was produced.

South Carolina is home to even more gold mines than North Carolina, some of which were still operational and selling gold up until the 1990s . At the Haile deposit in Lancaster County, which was discovered in 1827, gold was mined sporadically until the World War II era. The mine was reopened as an open-pit operation in the 1980s, operating until the early 1990s.

The site of the first large-scale gold rush, Georgia was the largest gold producer in the U.S. during the early part of the 19th century. The Georgia gold rush followed closely behind the discovery of the 17 pound gold nugget found in North Carolina in 1799; supposition that gold would also be found in nearby parts of Georgia meant that prospectors soon began looking there. It was not difficult to find gold in Georgia ? home to many placer deposits, which are deposits lying very close to the surface of the earth, gold was literally found lying on the ground in Georgia. As stories of the motherlode in Georgia began to circulate, a gold rush began in earnest.

When the gold rush in Georgia began to gather speed in 1828-1829, prospectors flooded the state. By 1830, an estimated 4000 miners were looking for gold in the Yahoola Creek area alone. By 1831, an estimated 6000-10,000 miners were working the lodes between the Chestastee and Etowah Rivers. The mining towns of Auraria and Dahlonega were reported to have supported approximately 15,000 miners.

The dark side of the Georgia gold rush was that the lands being mined were held by the Cherokee Indians; the Cherokees found their lands taken away from them in the form of land lotteries, in which the state of Georgia seized their land for gold mining, then by the U.S. Mint, who placed a mint at Dahlonega to take advantage of the gold readily available there. These factors contributed to the eventual migration of the Cherokees on the infamous Trail of Tears.

The gold rush in Georgia was over by the 1840s, when many miners defected to California’s gold rush. However, the gold mines in Georgia continued to produce gold until the mid 20th century. The 500 mines spread throughout 37 different counties produced an estimated 870,000 troy ounces of gold between 1828 and the mid 20th Century.

Virginia was also the site of many gold mines. As early as 1804, placer mines were located in Virginia, followed by the location of lode mines. Mining on a respectable scale took place in Virginia until slowed down by the defection of many miners to the California gold rush in the 1840s.

It was not the California gold rush that stopped mining in Virginia; rather, it was the Civil War. With most of the local miners pressed into service in the Confederacy, the mines lay dormant during the war. As the war began winding down, Union troops, bent on destroying the economic base of the South, damaged many of Virginia’s gold mines beyond repair, although most were nearly mined out by this point, at any rate. Making it much more expensive than using local scrap gold resources and the gold being mined out west.

Other mines in the state gradually reopened after the Civil War, and continued to produce gold on a small scale until the World War II effort put a stop to all but the smallest gold producers. At its peak, Virginia’s gold mines were third largest in production in the U.S.

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