The Gold History that Inspired Deadly Gold Rush: PART I
The first gold rush in the United States sprung from twelve-year-old Conrad Reed’s discovery in 1799 of a seventeen-pound gold nugget in Little Meadow Creek in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, not too far from Charlotte, the city where I grew up and heard stories about Charlotte’s gold rush days.
Conrad was playing in the creek that ran through his father’s farm when he spied the shiny yellow rock the size of a shoe. He picked it up and found it was heavier than he expected. He showed it to his father, John Reed, who showed it to a Concord silversmith, who told him the rock was worthless.
Unfazed, the Reeds used the rock for three years for what author Bruce Roberts in The Carolina Gold Rush called “the world’s most expensive door stop.” That doorstop turned out to be one of the largest nuggets ever found in the eastern United States. And, yes, the story Yeager told his friends was true. A Fayetteville jeweler swindled ole man Reed by paying him $3.50 for a nugget that was worth several thousand dollars at the time.
When John Reed discovered the jeweler scammed him, he went to the creek and found more gold, and with several partners, they began to search for gold on the surface with slave labor, leading in 1803 to a slave named Peter discovering a twenty-eight-pound nugget just under the surface in Reed’s Meadow Creek. It was believed to be the largest nugget discovered at the time in the United States.
When word spread about Reed’s good fortune, farmers bought gear to search for gold on their properties, leading to discoveries in Anson, Montgomery, Mecklenburg, and other counties in the state. From around 1804 to 1828, most of the domestic gold coined at the United States Mint in Philadelphia came from North Carolina, and the excitement resulted in thousands of foreigners coming to North Carolina to make their fortunes.
Around 1830, the Western Carolinian of Salisbury and the Miners’ and Farmers’ Journal of Charlotte regularly published articles and advertisements to satisfy the public’s thirst for information on gold, including where to find it and how to get at it. Other state newspapers fueled the rush with tall tales about nuggets found that were too heavy to lift.
During the early days of the Carolina Gold Rush, miners engaged in what was called branch or placer mining on the surface. Several decades later, miners dug shafts and mined gold underground, by following the vein of gold.
Today, Reed Gold Mine is a State Historic Site where visitors can tour underground mine tunnels, see the restored ore-crushing stamp mill, and pan for gold.
The Charlotte Gold Rush featured in my novel Deadly Gold Rush grew out of the frenzy created by Conrad Reed’s discovery.
The April 8, 1929, headline in The Charlotte Observer read: “Streets of Charlotte Literally Paved with Gold.” In the early 1800s, all those newcomers hoped that was true.
The first recorded attempt to follow a gold vein below the surface in Mecklenburg County was by Samuel McComb on his farm in 1825, and it made him rich. The McComb Mine, which later became known as the Saint Catherine Mine, was near where the Carolina Panthers football team plays today, with shafts to a depth of more than one hundred feet and tunnels in many directions. The Rudisill Mine featured in Deadly Gold Rush dug vertical shafts as deep as three hundred feet, with horizontal tunnels connecting them.
Gold fever led to close to sixty mines popping up across the county, making Mecklenburg the county with the most mines in the state. Many of those mines went by the names of their landowners, but others were more creative, such as the Black Cat, Queen of Sheba, King Soloman, and Yellow Dog.
Working the mines was a tough way to earn a living. Miners often turned their pay into liquor. One northern observer could “hardly conceive of a more immoral community… Drunkenness, gambling, fighting, lewdness, and every other vice exist here to an awful extent.”
And yet, even though Charlotte was a lively place—with the taverns and the “Sons of Temperance” making their cases against each other—Charlotte did not devolve to a Wild-West-style saloon town. Businesses thrived by selling to the miners.
With the Charlotte Mint’s arrival in 1837 and the numerous mines being worked in the Charlotte area, Charlotte became the mining capital of the United States.
In Part 2 of this series, I will discuss several interesting people from the Charlotte Gold Rush era who inspired the characters in Deadly Gold Rush
If you’d like to learn more my novel Deadly Gold Rush and how to order it, please see the home page of landiswade.com. The novel will be available in print, eBook, and audiobook. Kindle Unlimited readers can get the eBook for free HERE.