The Georgia Gold Rush

In the late 1820s, north Georgia became the site of the first gold rush in the United States, predating the more famous 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 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry 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

(00:22):
a whole, big blind spot in my historical knowledge about it.
I had only the vaguest idea about their having been
gold mining in Georgia. I did not know that there
had been an actual gold rush here. 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 de Lanaga 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

(00:44):
had no idea. So if you grew up in Georgia,
you probably knew this was a thing. But it is
also tied to some of the darkest parts of our
country's history regarding the treatment of Native Americans, and I
kind of suspect that was not part of school field trips. Uh,
So it's worth examining. And it also pre dates the
California Gold Rush. Which was of course a much bigger

(01:05):
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 Strouse episode,
but Georgia's, which happened twenty years earlier, was the first
gold rush in US history. So that is what we
were talking about today. How the gold rush started in
Georgia as something of a mystery. There are competing stories

(01:25):
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 into
North Georgia looking for gold in the fifteen hundreds. English
explorers followed, and before them there were Native Americans in

(01:45):
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 was
while the rush is predicated on new discoveries of what
they thought were going to be really productive lines. People

(02:10):
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 time
that is now part of Lumpkin County. Parks claims that
on October eight he found a nugget of gold simply
on the ground at a place on his property in

(02:32):
the county seat, which was known as lick Log at
the time that was refounded as Delonaga in eighteen thirty three,
after a Cherokee word that meant golden or yellow. And
this is a disputed story though Parks later claimed that
he had found the gold in eighteen seven, but this
proved problematic as he almost immediately leased that land to
a mining operation. But he didn't own that patch of

(02:53):
land until mid eight so the story shifted around a
little bit on the timeline. And additionally, there's no documentation
in the 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 finds
on his property when he sold that land, a year later,

(03:14):
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
Atlantic Constitution in eighteen ninety four about the discovery of
gold in 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 nineties.

(03:35):
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.
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. Will I remember accurately what happened
when I was thirty? Oh? Yeah, I mean we uh.

(03:57):
I have that moment all the time with friends or
my spouse where we'll talk about some events that happened,
even like a couple of months ago, and it's like,
that's not what happened, No, it happened this way, And
if we 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 Wards Creek, and yet another story

(04:19):
is that a man named John wither Uds 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 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

(04:40):
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 one, eight twenty nine, the Georgia Journal of Millageville,
Georgia ran and noticed that the paper had been informed
that quote to gold mines have just been dis covered

(05:00):
in this county and preparations are making to bring these
hidden treasures of the earth to use stories of alluvial gold.
That term allivial doesn't necessarily mean this, but it's come
to mean it in terms of gold. That's the gold
that's found through painting 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.

(05:23):
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 fines and the Carolinas already, which
I know about because while Holly's husband was taking field
trips to dallat Aga, I was taking field trips to
read gold mine in North Carolina. This was the beginning

(05:45):
of public knowledge that there was gold in Georgia as well,
but by the fall there were gold mines scattered all
through North Georgia an independent prospectors had inundated the area.
The first wave of gold hunters to move into the
newly identified mining area where own as the twenty Niners,
and many of these early prospectors were involved in placer
or deposit mining, meaning digging or panting for gold that

(06:08):
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
lucrative spot, but eventually more industrial forms of mining moved
in and teams could look for or in tunnels dug underground.

(06:29):
The specific area where the gold was found was in
part of the Cherokee Nation. While Cherokee people's had lived
in the southeast for hundreds of years, long before the
white settlers, by the eighteen twenties there was already a
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

(06:52):
simply take that land away in the interest of financial
gain for the non native people's. In eighty eight, the
state of Georgia asked a group of laws that were
intended to take away the rights of the Cherokee 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

(07:14):
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 open for Cherokees to
be abused by white citizens with absolutely no legal recourse.
And while the legislators behind these laws had hoped the
federal government would move Native people's out of the area,
they had just grown tired of waiting, and so they

(07:35):
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.
So we had just talked about these laws that have

(07:56):
been passed in Georgia to make life very difficult for
Cheroe Key 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

(08:18):
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 this Cherokee nation

(08:41):
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 the noted. The Indian Removal Act of eighteen
thirty was signed by President Andrew Jackson, who had been

(09:02):
elected 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

(09:24):
the 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 over 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,

(09:46):
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 I went to the United States Supreme Court. In
that case, a stionary named Samuel Austin Wooster was arrested
for breaking a newly enacted Georgia law that prohibited white

(10:07):
missionaries from living on Cherokee land. Wooster 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,

(10:30):
the finding and Wooster versus Georgia indicated that the Cherokee
people's 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

(10:51):
on paper, but it didn't actually help the Cherokee retain
their land. Forcible removal began in eighteen thirty eight, but already,
in going back to eighteen thirty this date of Georgia
had managed to seize parts of the Cherokee nation and
then redistributed and parcels to white citizens. That court case,
Whister versus Georgia is actually has actually been cited so
many times as the recognition of the fact that Native

(11:15):
American nations existed distinctly and should have their own rights
um 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

(11:35):
lotteries in the state of Georgia that took place between
eighteen o five and eighteen thirty three. So for ten dollars,
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 a lot numbers
for the available parcels were put into a second barrel,
so a name and a lot number were drawn each

(11:57):
time to match winners up with their new landholding. 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.

(12:17):
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 thousand by immediately selling his newly
acquired property, and Native Americans were barred from participating in

(12:39):
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 a lot her forty acres. She did not

(13:02):
take 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

(13:24):
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 value of their minds
take was continues to be debated. A figure of a
thousand dollars per day is often mentioned, but that is
a completely unverified number. From eighteen thirty eighteen thirty seven,

(13:45):
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 ment 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

(14:05):
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 returned 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 eight percent cash value. Option used the twenty percent

(14:27):
difference as sort of an insurance policy in case the
initial assessment had been erroneous and overestimated. There was also
an option to take the eight percent in cash and
then get the other twenty percent after the Philadelphia Mint
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

(14:48):
that followed 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 that was closer to home. So this was

(15:11):
the ment of a silversmith named Templeton Read who went
by the name Temple And he set up a smallment
in Gainesville, Georgia, and he pressed coins in two dollar,
fifty cent, five dollar, and ten dollar denominations. The requirement
for a pressed gold coin was that it had to
containcent gold, and soon after Reid started at as enterprise,
he was accused of shorting his coins by adding filler.

(15:35):
Has caused all kinds of problems for Read, and after
beginning operation in mid July thirty by mid October of
the same year, the Read meant was closed. Incidentally, the
gold coins that were pressed by Read, which later were
tested and found to contain only ninety five percent gold,
are now highly sought after by collectors. There are not

(15:57):
a lot of them running around and people want them. Uh.
In eighteen thirty one. Another mint, not as close to
the Georgia gold finds as reads Gainesville Press, but closer
than Philadelphia, opened in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, and that mint
was run by a man named Christopher Bechler. Unlike Read,
his enterprise had some longevity. Bechler ran his mint for

(16:18):
almost twenty years until eighteen fifty, and he did not
grapple with accusations of improperly minted coins as Read had.
On June eighteen thirty four, President Andrew Jackson signed the
Coinage Act of eighteen thirty four. This acts that specific
quantities of metal to be included in coinage and also
stated that quote all standard gold or silver deposited for

(16:40):
coinage after the thirty one 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 percent um. This
made the process of getting minted coin cash money for
gold deposit much faster and easier, and it got rid

(17:03):
of that twenty percent value deduction that people would previously
had to have taken if they wanted the value of
their golden 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 quote be
it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of
the United States of America in Congress assembled. The branches

(17:25):
of the Ment 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, And
one branch at or near Delonaga in Lumpkin County in
the state of Georgia, also for the coinage of gold only.
The establishment of the Delawnagament in eighteen thirty five was

(17:49):
the result of an effort that had actually begun in
eighteen thirty three. Two. You try to address the ongoing
needs of the area and it's gold miners. But even
so that wasn't an active office, and eighteen thirty eight,
when it was finally able to start accepting gold deposits,
it opened on February twelve, thirty eight and pressed its
first gold coins the following April. The irony is that

(18:11):
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
minors that there was still more gold to be unearthed
in the North Georgia Mountains, the rush was over. Mark
Twain's character Mulberry Sellers in the novel, the American claimant

(18:31):
is said to be paraphrasing Stevenson when he utters the
famous line there's gold and then our hills. Yeah. The
quote from Stevenson is is much less um much less them.
They are much less of them, are It was kind
of like, hey, there, I believe they are still golden.
There's still golden the hills. By the time it was
told to Mark Twain, he got its second hand, and

(18:53):
by the time he wrote it as a character, it
got a little more um color, will say. And in
the late eight teen forties, when gold was discovered in California,
no amount of assurance that there 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

(19:15):
was more or less over in Georgia and the Delawnaga
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 long term profitability
eluded the companies who were trying to operate in the area,
and there was another very short nineteen thirties gold mining

(19:36):
effort in Georgia in what looked like it could be
a post depression rebound. Some minds, including Mary Franklin's, were reopened,
but by the end of the decade even the last
hangers on had given up the effort, and it really
did not count as a 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

(19:58):
the Delonaga 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 as part
of the State Park Service. Yeah, 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. I've been said De
Lawaga a few times and I can't recall if I've

(20:21):
actually gone into the museum. I know I have been
adjacent to it. I do not think I have ever
been to de Lawaga, which probably speaks horribly of me
because it is like a thirty minute drive from my hat.
It's really pretty. Um yeah, I just have never had
occasion to to make the drive out there. Maybe now

(20:41):
I will. Do you have some listener mail to close
out our show? I do, and it is delightful. It's
a wonderful gift from our listener. Barbara Trades, Deer, Holly
and Tracy. Greetings from the UK. This is my second
postcard to you. The first was skelling Michael, which I remember.
Thank you in the recent podcast on the First Celebrity
Chef and in Karam you mentioned the banquet he prepared

(21:02):
for the Prince Region in honor of the visit of
Nicholas of Russia at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. I
remember my visit to the pavilion a few years ago
that they sold souvenirs featuring the menu. I mean it's
to revisit last week and I bought you each a
tea cloth. I hope you like them. If you ever
come to the UK, you must visit the pavilion. The
chandelier in the banqueting room took my breath away. It's spectacular.

(21:24):
Thanks for such a fab podcast, Never stop. So she
sent us these fabulous I'm holding them up for Tracy
to see, like tea towels that have the entire menu
printed on them. That cool event, and they're really quite beautiful.
So thank you, thank you, thank you so much, Barbara.
These are absolutely lovely. And it was one of those
moments where opening mail was an absolute treat. I love

(21:45):
when you when I get a package and I'm like,
I don't have any idea what is going on here?
And then I couldn't find the card at first, and
I was like, someone said us something amazing and I
don't know who it was, so trauma averted. I found
the car um. If you would like to right to us,
you could do so at History Podcast at how stuff
works dot com. You can find us all over social media.
As missed in History. You can find us online at

(22:08):
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(22:29):
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