SYMHC Classics: Georgia Gold Rush

This 2018 episode covers the period in the late 1820s when north Georgia became the site of a gold rush that predated the California gold rush by two decades. It's also tied to some of the darkest parts of U.S. history regarding the treatment of Native Americans.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Today's classic is on the Georgia gold Rush,
which has some connections to our recent episode on Mary
gold or Ross. Specifically, it gives a little bit more
detail on state and federal efforts to remove the Cherokee
from North Georgia in the early nineteenth century. When this
episode initially came out, we got some messages from listeners

(00:23):
about whether the seventeen ninety nine discovery of gold in
North Carolina, which we mentioned in this episode, should have
been described as the first gold rush in the US
rather than the Georgia gold Rush. And the answer is
maybe the initial discovery in North Carolina definitely predated the
discovery that sparked the Georgia Gold Rush, but the biggest

(00:45):
peak of the rush in North Carolina was mostly after
the big rush in Georgia. Yeah, and it's often difficult
to conclusively say which thing was the first when there
were various gold discoveries in the USA. Also, please pardon
our mispronunciation of plaster bining, something we actually mispronounced again

(01:07):
in another episode after this one before someone brought it
to our attention that it is not pronounced placer like
it looks like it would be said based on how
it is spelled. This episode originally came out on August
twenty seventh, twenty eighteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and Welcome

(01:37):
to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson,
and today's episode is a bit of history that is
local to me and our offices in Atlanta. But I
will confess a whole, big blind spot in my historical
knowledge about it. I had only the vaguest idea about
there having been gold mining in Georgia. I did not
know that there had been an actual gold rush here.

(01:59):
And of course when I mentioned it to my husband,
who grew up in Georgia, he said, of course I
knew that. We went on field trips to Delanaga to
learn about it, and they gave us a little piece
of gold. And I was like, I didn't grow up
here and I had no idea. So if you grew
up in Georgia, you probably knew this was the thing.
But it is also tied to some of the darkest
parts of our country's history regarding the treatment of Native Americans,

(02:20):
and I kind of suspect that was not part of
school field trips, so it's worth examining. And it also
pre dates the California Gold Rush, which was of course
a much bigger driver of long term economic growth in
that area than the Georgia gold Rush was in Northern Georgia.
We talked about that a little bit in our Levice
Strauss episode, but Georgia's, which happened twenty years earlier, was

(02:41):
the first gold rush in US history. So that is
what we are talking about today. How the gold rush
started in Georgia is something of a mystery. There are
competing stories regarding the origin point, but to be clear,
before we get into any of those, the events that
we're talking about today did take place in the eighteen hundreds.
It's not as though nobody had ever seen gold in
the area before Spanish and French explorers made their way

(03:03):
into North Georgia looking for gold. In the fifteen hundreds,
English explorers followed, and before them there were Native Americans
in the area, and early accounts of those European expeditions
indicate that the native population already knew that there were
gold deposits in the area. Also, gold deposits in other
parts of the southeast, not a foreign idea. Yeah, this

(03:24):
was while the rush is predicated on new discoveries of
what they thought were going to be really productive lines.
People knew already that there was gold in the area.
But as for the nineteenth century, the most common of
the quote discovery stories attributes the find to Benjamin Parks,
who was living in what was Hall County at the

(03:46):
time that is now part of Lumpkin County. Parks claims
that on October twenty seventh, eighteen twenty eight, he found
a nugget of gold simply on the ground at a
place on his property in the county seat, which was
known as Licklog at the time that was refounded as
Delanaga in eighteen thirty three, after a Cherokee word that
meant golden or yellow. And this is a disputed story

(04:06):
though Parks later claimed that he had found the gold
in eighteen twenty seven, but this proved problematic as he
almost immediately leased that land to a mining operation. But
he didn't own that patch of land until mid eighteen
twenty eight, so the story shifted around a little bit
on the timeline. And additionally, there's no documentation in the

(04:27):
form of a lease contract or anything similar to clarify
the matter. And while he claimed that he had made
nearly twenty four thousand dollars in gold fines on his property,
when he sold that land a year later, the new
owner only managed to find a very small amount. What
are the reasons that Parks's story has been cited so often?
Is because he gave an interview to the Atlanta Constitution

(04:49):
in eighteen ninety four about the discovery of gold and
the state and the population boom that followed it. While
this is often held up as a first hand account,
it's important to remember that Parks was in his night nineties.
By that point, six decades had passed since the time
of the Georgia Gold Rush. Yeah. I'm always a little
astounded because people really do hold that up as no.

(05:09):
But we have an eyewitness account, and I'm like, that's
a lot of time. I don't remember what happened yesterday
when I am ninety. Well, I remember accurately what happened
when I was thirty. Oh yeah, I mean we I
have that moment all the time with friends or my
spouse where we'll talk about some event that happened, even
like a couple months ago, and it's like, that's not
what happened. No, it happened this way. And if we

(05:31):
can't remember that, I just we all know the memory
can be a bit dodgy. But that is just one
of several stories. Another man named Jesse Hogan allegedly found
gold in Ward's Creek, and yet another story is that
a man named John Witherood's found the first piece of
gold in Duke's Creek. And then there's a tale of
a different man named Logan, not Jesse, a different, different

(05:53):
person that claims that an enslaved man who worked for
Logan was actually the one who realized that the soil
they saw as they passed through Georgia was similar to
the soil that they had already seen golden in other places.
So there are a bunch of different stories, and these
and other origin points have all been claimed over the
years with varying degrees of credibility. On August first, eighteen

(06:16):
twenty nine, the Georgia Journal of Millageville, Georgia ran and
noticed that the paper had been informed that quote two
gold mines have just been discovered in this county, and
preparations are making to bring these hidden treasures of the
earth to use stories of alluvial gold. That term alluvial
doesn't necessarily mean this, but it's come to mean it
in terms of gold. That's the gold that's found through

(06:38):
panning on a river rather than mining, because it is
theoretically moved down a mountain through streams and through melting
water or ice that melted into water. Those stories also
began to appear in local papers, and so soon would
be prospectors started showing up in the state, eager to
try to make their fortune. At this point, there had
been gold mines and the Carolinas already, which I know

(07:00):
about because while Holly's husband was taking field trips to
de Ladega, I was taking field trips to read gold
mine in North Carolina. This is the beginning of public
knowledge that there was gold in Georgia as well. But
by the fall there were gold mines scattered all through
North Georgia and independent prospectors had inundated the area. The
first wave of gold hunters to move into the newly

(07:23):
identified mining area were known as the twenty nine ers,
and many of these early prospectors were involved in placer
or deposit mining, meaning digging or panning for gold that
had washed down from those hilly areas and mountains, and
you didn't need much equipment for this kind of gold hunting,
so solo prospectors could just sort of follow their instincts
and search wherever they could find what looked like a

(07:45):
lucrative spot. But eventually more industrial forms of mining moved
in and teams could look for or in tunnels dug underground.
The specific area where the gold was found was in
part of the Cherokee Nation. All Cherokee peoples had lived
in the southeast for hundreds of years, long before the
white settlers. By the eighteen twenties, there was already a

(08:06):
movement among Georgia's white citizens to try to have the
Cherokee removed. As the discovery of gold on Cherokee land
became public knowledge, there was an even greater fervor to
simply take that land away in the interest of financial
gain for the non native peoples. In eighteen twenty eight,
the state of Georgia passed a group of laws that
were intended to take away the rights of the Cherokee

(08:28):
people in an effort to force them out of the state,
basically to make it as inhospitable to live in the
area as possible, and among these was a statement that
Native Americans could not bring a legal suit against a
white man, nor could a Native American be a witness
in any court case against a white man. So at
that point, the legal door was opened for Cherokees to
be abused by white citizens with absolutely no legal recourse.

(08:52):
And while the legislators behind these laws had hoped the
federal government would move Native peoples out of the area,
they had just grown tired of waiting, and so they
basically wanted to make it miserable for any Cherokee who
lived within state lines. We'll get to the Cherokee Nation's
response to this action, but first we are going to
pause and have a quick word from one of our sponsors.

(09:21):
So we had just talked about these laws that had
been passed in Georgia to make life very difficult for
Cherokee people's living there, and in response, the Cherokee Nations
sought an injunction against those laws from the Supreme Court.
Cherokee Nation versus Georgia claimed that these new laws violated
the treaties that were in place and had been negotiated
between the Cherokee and the United States in the opinion

(09:45):
written by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. He stated, quote,
the Court has bestowed its best attention on his question,
and after mature deliberation, the majority is of opinion that
an Indian tribe or nation within the United States is
not a foreign state in the sense of the Constitution,
and cannot maintain an action in the courts of the
United States. If it be true that the Cherokee Nation

(10:08):
have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those
rights are to be asserted. If it be true that
wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to
be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress
the past or prevent the future. The motion for an
injunction is denied. The Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty
was signed by President Andrew Jackson, who had been elected

(10:30):
in eighteen twenty eight, around the same time that the
State of Georgia had been getting impatient about Native Americans
and whether the federal government would take action to push
them off of their land. The Indian Removal Act stated
that Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River were
to be evicted from their land and moved to unsettled
land west of the Mississippi. This, of course, was the

(10:51):
act that eventually led to the Trail of Tears, but
there were many Native Americans who resisted the removal early on,
and additional legal battles were fought for the land. In
February eighteen thirty one, knowing the federal government wouldn't interfere,
surveyors began measuring the Cherokee land to be sectioned into
plots for disbursement to white citizens. In eighteen thirty two,

(11:13):
there was another court case that led the Supreme Court
to examine the relationship between Native American nations and the
state and federal government, with the case of Worcester versus
Georgia now went to the United States Supreme Court. In
that case, a missionary named Samuel Austin Wooster was arrested
for breaking a newly enacted Georgia law that prohibited white

(11:34):
missionaries from living on Cherokee land. Worcester had been there
as a guest and ally of the Cherokee Nation, and
the lawsuit was filed with the intent of more clearly
defining the rights of the Cherokee Nation and established that
they had a right to manage their own territory. In
a surprising contrast to the language in the denial of
injunction that Marshall wrote in relation to Cherokee Nation versus Georgia,

(11:57):
the finding in Wooster versus Georgia indicated the the Cherokee
peoples were a nation of quote, distinct, independent political communities,
retaining their original natural rights as already laid out in
a number of treaties that had been agreed upon with
the Cherokee peoples. Thus, Georgia law could not overrule the
agreements that the US had negotiated. This was a victory

(12:18):
on paper, but it didn't actually help the Cherokee retain
their land. Forcible removal began in eighteen thirty eight, but already,
and going back to eighteen thirty, the State of Georgia
had managed to seize parts of the Cherokee Nation and
then redistributed in parcels to white citizens. That court case,
Wister versus Georgia is actually has actually been cited so
many times as the recognition of the fact that Native

(12:42):
American nations existed distinctly and should have their own rights.
But as Tracy said, it did not really help in
this particular instance. So the manner in which these lots
that had been taken and parted out were assigned to
owners was through a lottery system, which started in October
eighteen thirty two. This was one of eight land lotteries

(13:03):
in the state of Georgia that took place between eighteen
oh five and eighteen thirty three. So for ten dollars,
a hopeful landowner could enter the lottery and their name
was then put on a piece of paper and added
to one barrel of possible draws, and then lot numbers
for the available parcels were put into a second barrel,
so a name and a lot number were drawn each

(13:24):
time to match winners up with their new landholdings. If
they were drawn in one of the two eighteen thirty
two lotteries which redistributed the Cherokee land, they would be
issued attractive land amounting to forty acres. These lots were
advertised as gold lots, but that name came with no
guarantee that any gold would be found on any given parcel.

(13:44):
Some people opted to turn their good luck at winning
a lottery plot to money right away, rather than start
a mining effort of their own. To that end, some
lots were essentially flipped. In one instance, a man who
had won a lot turned his ten dollars for his
lottery ticket into ten thhs by immediately selling his newly
acquired property. And Native Americans were barred from participating in

(14:06):
the lottery, so there was no way that any of
them could gain any land back. One of the lottery
winners in eighteen thirty two was a woman named Mary G. Franklin,
who was a widow. As indicated by the story of
the farmer who immediately flipped his land for profit, there
were plenty of potential buyers for the lottery parcels, and
Mary Franklin started getting offers almost as soon as she
had been allotted her forty acres. She did not take

(14:29):
any of them, though, and instead opted to go inspect
the property in person. There were already men hunting for
gold on the lot, and she sent them packing, deciding
that she and her family would work the land themselves.
This turned out to be a really lucrative decision. Soon
the Franklin Mine was turning a nice profit, so much
so that Mary started buying up adjacent parcels of land

(14:51):
and building herself a small mining empire. The Franklin Mine
outlasted many other such ventures in the area, and the
estimates on just how high the valleyalue of their Mind's
take was continues to be debated. A figure of one
thousand dollars per day is often mentioned, but that is
a completely unverified number. From eighteen thirty to eighteen thirty seven,

(15:12):
almost two million dollars worth of gold was moved from
North Georgia to Philadelphia to be minted. Any gold fines
were normally assessed at a local branch of the Mint,
and then the Mint would issue a certificate to the
owner that declared the value of the gold that had
been submitted, and at that point the owner had a
number of options. They could exchange that certificate for eighty

(15:32):
percent of the value of their gold and get cash
in return, or they could wait approximately three months for
the gold to be minted and then return to them
in coins for the full amount. Or they could take
the entirety in gold coins once the gold had been
transferred to the larger Mint office in Philadelphia and verified.
That eighty percent cash value option used the twenty percent

(15:54):
difference as sort of an insurance policy in case the
initial assessment had been erroneous. Overestimated. There was also an
option to take the eighty percent in cash and then
get the other twenty percent after the Philadelphia men had
completed its assessment. Of course, this was not really an
ideal situation, and we will talk about one of the
early efforts to remedy it, as well as others that followed.

(16:16):
Following this quick little break for a sponsor that keeps
our show going, The first private gold mint in the
United States actually formed as a way to speed this
process along and offer an option to miners and prospectors

(16:37):
that was closer to home. So this was the mint
of a silversmith named Templeton Reid who went by the
name Temple and he set up a small mint in Gainesville, Georgia,
and he pressed coins in two dollars, fifty cent, five dollars,
and ten dollars denominations. The requirement for a pressed gold
coin was that it had to contain ninety nine percent gold,

(16:58):
and soon after Reid started to enterprise, he was accused
of shorting his coins by adding filler. Has caused all
kinds of problems for Reed, and after beginning operation in
mid July of eighteen thirty, by mid October of the
same year the Reed Mint was closed. Incidentally, the gold
coins that were pressed by Reed, which later were tested

(17:20):
and found to contain only ninety five percent gold, are
now highly sought after by collectors. There are not a
lot of them running around, and people want them. In
eighteen thirty one, another mint, not as close to the
Georgia goldfinds as Reed's Gainesville Press, but closer than Philadelphia,
opened in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, and that mint was run

(17:40):
by a man named Christopher Beckler. Unlike Reed, his enterprise
had some longevity. Beckler ran his mint for almost twenty
years until eighteen fifty, and he did not grapple with
accusations of improperly minted coins as Reid had. On June
twenty eighth, eighteen thirty four, President Andrew Jackson signed the
Coinage Act of A two thirty four. This act set

(18:02):
specific quantities of metal to be included in coinage and
also stated that quote all standard gold or silver deposited
for coinage after the thirty first of July next shall
be paid for in coin under the direction of the
Secretary of the Treasury within five days from the making
of such deposit, deducting from the amount of said deposit
of gold and silver one half of one percentum. This

(18:25):
made the process of getting minted coin cash money for
a gold deposit much faster and easier, and it got
rid of that twenty percent value deduction that people would
previously had to have taken if they wanted the value
of their gold in cash right away. On March third
of the following year, the Meant Act of eighteen thirty
five established new mints and three locations, stated as follows

(18:47):
quote be it enacted by the Senate and House of
Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled
that branches of the Mint of the United States shall
be established as follows, one branch at the City of
New Orleans for the coinage of gold and silver, one
branch at the town of Charlotte in Mecklenburg County in
the state of North Carolina for the coinage of gold only,

(19:07):
And one branch at or near Delanaga in Lumpkin County
in the state of Georgia, also for the coinage of
gold only. The establishment of the Delanaga Mint in eighteen
thirty five was the result of an effort that had
actually begun in eighteen thirty three to you try to
address the ongoing needs of the area and its gold miners.
But even so, that wasn't an active office until eighteen

(19:29):
thirty eight, when it was finally able to start accepting
gold deposits. It opened on February twelfth, eighteen thirty eight,
and pressed its first gold coins the following April. The
irony is that in the time that it had taken
to petition for a mint in Georgia, the Georgia gold
rush had largely played itself out. While the state geologist
Matthew Stevenson assured miners that there was still more gold

(19:52):
to be unearthed in the North Georgia Mountains, the rush
was over. Mark Twain's character Mulberry Cellars in the eighteen
ninety two novel The American Claimant is said to be
paraphrasing Stevenson when he utters the famous line there's gold
and then the oar hills. Yeah. The quote from Stevenson
is is much less much less than are you much

(20:12):
less than thre It was kind of like, hey, there,
I believe there are still golden there's still gold in
the hills. By the time it was told to Mark Twain,
he got it second hand, and by the time he
wrote it as a character, it got a little more color,
we'll say. And in the late eighteen forties, when gold
was discovered in California, no amount of assurance that there

(20:33):
was still gold in the Georgia Mountains could keep the
Georgia gold industry alive. After a very brief gasp of
breath in the form of hydraulic mining in the eighteen fifties,
the gold rush was more or less over in Georgia,
and the Dolanaga Mint closed in eighteen sixty. A second
brief gold rush came and went at the turn of
the century. Advancements and technology enabled some early fines, but

(20:56):
long term profitability eluded the companies who were trying to
operate in the area, and there was another very short
nineteen thirties gold mining effort in Georgia in what looked
like it could be a post depression rebound. Some mines,
including Mary Franklin's, were reopened, but by the end of
the decade even the last hangars On had given up
the effort, and it really did not count as a

(21:18):
gold rush. It was kind of like an effort today.
The Lumpkin County Courthouse that was built in eighteen thirty
six is now home to the Delanaga Gold Museum. The
courthouse was restored and it includes locally made original bricks
that contain a small amount of gold. It's now a
historic site and is part of the State park Service. Yeah,

(21:38):
so you can go visit it, which is probably what
Brian visited when he went while he was in school
learning about these things that I did not learn about. Yeah.
I've been to Delanaga a few times, and I can't
recall if I've actually gone into the museum. I know
I have been adjacent to it. I do not think
I have ever been to Delaniga, which probably speaks horribly

(22:00):
of me, because it is like a thirty minute drive
from my house. It's really pretty. Yeah, I just have
never had occasion to make the drive out there. Maybe
now I will. Thanks so much for joining us on
this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note,

(22:20):
our email addresses History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and
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