Alabama Gold Read online




  Published by The History Press

  Charleston, SC

  www.historypress.net

  Copyright © 2016 by Peggy Jackson Walls

  All rights reserved

  First published 2016

  e-book edition 2016

  ISBN 978.1.43965.661.7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931935

  print edition ISBN 978.1.46713.598.6

  Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Dedicated to the Hog Mountain gold miners whose stories made this book possible and especially to my father, Kermit Roosevelt Jackson (1909–1951).

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  PART I: THE OLD SOUTHWEST: AMERICA’S FIRST GOLD RUSHES

  1. “Alabama Fever”

  2. Tallapoosa County’s Gold Mining Districts: Devil’s Backbone, Eagle Creek, Goldville and Hog Mountain

  3. “It’s Good to Be Shifty in a New Country”

  4. Cotton Boom and Bust, Lost Confederate Gold, New Interest in Gold Mining

  5. Tallapoosa County: “Gold Country”

  6. Hillabee Gold Mining Company (1890–1916)

  PART II: SURVIVING THE DEPRESSION: “GRINDING STONE INTO BREAD”

  7. The Hog Mountain Mining and Milling Company: 1933–1937

  8. Life in a Gold Mining Community

  9. Notable People and Events

  10. From the Mine to the Mill: J.P. Mooney

  Appendix: An Incomplete List of Hog Mountain Gold Miners

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Preface

  In 1982, I began what would become a lifetime of researching, interviewing and writing about the Hog Mountain gold mine in northeast Tallapoosa County. Located less than three miles from my childhood home and rising four hundred feet from the surrounding landscape, the mountain was a daily, visible presence as familiar to my family as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. I first learned the gold mining history of the mountain from conversations with family members and neighbors who worked for the Tallapoosa Mining and Milling Company in the 1930s. In school, I learned the geography and history of Tallapoosa County, where in the early 1800s, major battles took place between Native Americans and federal troops preparing the way for an influx of white settlers in the 1830s. But the Alabama history book contained no stories of America’s first gold miners, who traveled down the Appalachian Mountains into the foothills of Georgia and crossed into Alabama.

  Gold within the Alabama gold belt counties lay beneath the soil of the old Creek Nation, similar to deposits in Georgia, mainly found under Cherokee land. The geography and the chronology of events suggest the presence of gold might have contributed to the agitation leading to the Indian Removal Act in 1832. Important events in Alabama’s history were the Native American culture, the Indian Wars of 1813–14 and the shifting of power from the Native Americans to the federal government after the defeat of the Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend on March 27, 1814. Included in the major events were the sale of the Native Americans’ land to white settlers and the evacuation of Indians from their homeland to the West. During the march, which became known as the Trail of Tears, thousands of Native Americans died from starvation, disease and exposure to the elements. The Five Civilized Tribes, listed as the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminoles and the Cherokee, assimilated into the white man’s way of living—residing in cabins and growing vegetables—but they were nevertheless banished from their ancestral lands.

  As ownership of the land in east-central Alabama was shifting in 1832, gold mining was taking place. But miners failed to keep personal records of their activities, or those who might have had access to the records did not deem them important enough to be preserved. Journals and papers of early travelers in Alabama, detailed conversations and letters of the military leaders, Indian agents and Native Americans survived from this period. Although rich in data regarding the Indian wars, they contained almost nothing about gold mining. Any records from this period were embedded with other information. From these scattered sources, Alabama Gold constructs and shares the story of antebellum gold mining in Alabama.

  The introduction summarizes the stories of America’s first gold discoveries in the southern Piedmont region: Cabarrus County, North Carolina; Lumpkin County, Georgia; and Chilton, Cleburne and Tallapoosa Counties in Alabama. The narrative reports of Alabama’s first state geologist, Michael Tuomey, who served from 1848 to 1858, provide estimations of gold mines’ potential in the Alabama gold belt and descriptions of mining strategies employed by the miners and mining companies. The surveys are largely technical but offer observations on the frenzied, disorganized manner in which antebellum mining was conducted. They describe hillsides pocked with holes that miners dug in haste and abandoned when they failed to find ore quickly. Recorded also are brief conversations with prospectors and local people, knowledgeable about mining activities in their areas. Without the careful notes of geologists, only a negligible amount of information about gold mining in Alabama would exist.

  With the encouragement of Judge C.J. Coley, Governor John Patterson, Dr. J. Wayne Flynt, Dr. Leah Atkins, Dr. Bert Hitchcock, Dr. Jerry Brown and Dr. Patrick Morrow, in the 1980s, I continued to research, write and promote the history of gold mining at Hog Mountain.

  A great deal of my research was primary, having grown up near Hog Mountain, I was acquainted with gold miners who worked during the Depression. They were of my parents’ generation, and some were extended family. I found their stories fascinating and historically significant. I began with the goal of publishing an article about the Hog Mountain Mining and Milling Company operation. This goal was accomplished in the publication of “Gold Mining at Hog Mountain in the 1930s” in the Alabama Review of July 1984. The twenty-five or so, interviews I conducted at this time also provided material on which I developed my master’s thesis, “Folklore and Folk Life in Southern Prose Fiction,” in which I linked Old Southwest humorist Johnson Jones Hooper’s writing to life in the 1840s, when gold mining was at its peak in Tallapoosa County. In writing about stereotypical characters in southern fiction, I learned a few famous characters, such as Mark Twain’s King and William Faulkner’s Abner Snopes, might have had their genesis in the stereotypical con man Simon Suggs. Suggs was modeled after the frontier lawyer Bird Young, who was also an early settler of Youngsville, now Alexander City. The literary connections are interesting because the characters and stories that came out of the Old Southwest territory reemerged later in famous works of southern fiction. The story of antebellum gold mining is set in the Old Southwest, where danger was imminent due to hostilities between the white settlers and the Indians who viewed them as “intruders” on their land. During the early gold mining days, east-central Alabama was in transition from being the seat of the once powerful Creek Nation to embracing the early settlers and “gold diggers.” Alabama Gold tells the story of antebellum gold mining and the pre–Civil War culture. The pre–World War I and Depression-era operations were motivated by economic circumstances and the American dream that anyone who persistently works hard will be rewarded with success. Alabama Gold is a history of all the miners who “busted and shoveled rock” to, first, gain a foothold in the young state of Alab
ama and, last, to hold on to it through the Depression.

  Acknowledgements

  I want to begin with an acknowledgement of academic mentors and friends Dr. J. Wayne Flynt and Dr. Leah Atkins, who encouraged me to continue researching and writing long after I completed my graduate work at Auburn University and promoted my research in their published work. I also would like to recognize Dr. Bert Hitchcock, Dr. Jerry Brown, Madison Jones, Nancy Anderson and Dr. Patrick Morrow for their support and encouragement.

  In Tallapoosa County, Judge C.J. Coley made sure I had copies of all his historical papers, including his last copy of the History of Tallapoosa County, and introduced me to Dr. Ed Bridges and the valuable resources of the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery. Thank you, Governor John Patterson and Tina, for your wonderful support and encouragement

  To all who opened their family albums, records and documents and made them accessible for use in Alabama Gold, thank you. Among them, John F. Farrow shared records and pictures of the Farrow Gold Mining Company’s operations in southern Tallapoosa County. I regret that I cannot provide the names of all the miners and their families, but the story of Alabama Gold is their story as well. Thanks to Ted and Shirley Spears, who invited me to share the gold mining story at the B.B. Comer Memorial Library in Sylacauga, and to the Adelia Russell Library in Alexander City. The Tallapoosee County Historical Association and Museum in Dadeville provided access to valuable documents and pictures related to Tallapoosa County gold mining. Thank you to Coy Powell for guiding me and my youngest son, Eddie, through the old caves and sites in Goldville in the 1980s, when I conducted most of the interviews in this book.

  Thanks to my children, Bill and Melissa, and my grandchildren, Tyler, Tatum, Emma and Sophie. Your interest and encouragement kept me committed to completing the story of gold mining at Hog Mountain for the descendants of the miners and for a broad audience of historians and gold mining enthusiasts. Thanks to the members of the Ballard, Nelson and Baker families and so many others for sharing a piece of the mining history.

  Special thanks go to Betty and Paul Wellborn for their permission to use pictures of Hog Mountain property and for sharing documents. Acknowledgement of current Hog Mountain pictures go to Audra Williams’s Photography. A note of appreciation is extended to Phillip Padgett, Alton Padgett, Douglas Champion, Larkin Radney and Ben Russell, who contributed to the final collection of information. Appreciation for permission to use pictures is extended to the Pine Mountain Museum in Villa Rica, Georgia; the Tallapoosee County Historical Museum in Dadeville, Alabama; and the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery, Alabama.

  Introduction

  Discovery of gold in the southern Piedmont states preceded the California gold rush by several decades. In the 1820s, ’30s and ’40s, prospectors, land investors, politicians, farmers, itinerant preachers, conmen and outright scoundrels made their way into America’s new frontiers, where the gold fields in Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama were teeming with mining activity. Southern gold was formed during volcanic and tectonic activity millions of years ago at the same time as the Appalachian Mountains. Deep within the Appalachian range, an intermittent line of gold veins, known as the Wedowee Schist, extended as far south as the Appalachian foothills of east-central counties in Alabama, such as Talladega, Randolph and Tallapoosa.

  Myths of Indian chiefs with hordes of hidden treasures attracted the first gold seekers to America’s southeastern region. With plans to claim the land and treasures for the Spanish empire, Alonso Álvarez de Pineda and his men arrived at present-day Mobile Bay in 1519. Pánfilo de Narváez and his party reached the Gulf Coast in 1527. Hernando de Soto, with seven hundred men and servants, two hundred horses, a drove of hogs and a pack of bloodhounds, came ashore on the west coast of present-day Florida in 1539. Each of these explorers, Alonso Álvarez de Pineda, Pánfilo de Narváez and Hernando de Soto, and their fellow conquistadors failed in their mission to build a wealthy Spanish empire in the New World. De Soto and his men traveled throughout the southeast in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and other Appalachian regions.

  In their first encounters with De Soto and his men, Native Americans welcomed the Europeans with food and gifts. The Spaniards responded by looting and destroying their villages and taking natives to serve as slaves and guides. In their three-year expedition, the conquistadors destroyed the Native Americans’ centuries-old way of life. Tens of thousands of natives died after being exposed to European diseases against which they had no immunity. Entire tribes deserted villages to escape death. The Spaniards did not fare well after depleting the natives’ food supply. After exhausting their own food supplies, they became so hungry they ate their horses. Sickness, starvation and battles with the Native Americans killed half of the conquistadors. Hernando de Soto’s expedition ended in the near mutiny of the remaining soldiers. On March 21, 1542, Hernando de Soto died of fever beside the Mississippi River, which he is credited with discovering. Following de Soto’s death, the Spaniards abandoned the failed expedition in the interior of the American wilderness and returned home. For all the death and destruction Hernando de Soto and his men brought to the Native Americans, they failed to discover gold or to establish a Spanish colony. Thus ended the Spaniards’ search for gold in the southern Piedmont and the Native Americans’ first encounters with Europeans.1

  The Spaniards diminished the Native Americans’ ability to defend themselves and their land against the French and the English who came into the southern Appalachian region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the early nineteenth century, Europeans came in great numbers to the southeastern territory and succeeded where Hernando de Soto failed. They broke the power of the southeastern Indian tribes in the Indian Wars of 1813–14, claimed their land for the federal government and turned the Native Americans’ ancestral hunting lands into farming land and mining fields. They discovered gold in some of the same regions Hernando de Soto and his men passed through in the southern Piedmont states of Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama.

  The story of pioneer gold mining in the southern Piedmont begins in Virginia with one of the nation’s founding fathers: signer of the Declaration of Independence, third president, planter, architect and author Thomas Jefferson.

  VIRGINIA GOLD

  In 1782, Thomas Jefferson documented the discovery of gold in Virginia in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785): “I knew a single instance of gold found in this state. It was interspersed in small specks through a lump of ore of about four pounds weight, which yielded seventeen pennyweights of gold.” The ore was found on the north side of Rappahannock River.2

  Palmer C. Sweet, in Gold in Virginia, reported the first lode deposit was discovered at the Whitehall mine in western Spotsylvania County. The first incorporated gold-mining company was the Virginia Mining Company of New York, operating in Orange County. Gold production from 1804 to 1828, consisting of an estimated 121 troy ounces, had an approximate value of $2,500. In the years from 1840 to 1849, production averaged nearly 3,000 ounces annually. Other southern Piedmont states followed the downward trend in gold production after gold was discovered in the western frontier in 1848. This trend continued through the Civil War years.3

  NORTH CAROLINA GOLD

  The first major gold discovery in the southern Piedmont took place in Cabarrus County, North Carolina. In 1799, twelve-year-old Conrad Reed, son of John and Sarah, noticed a yellow rock protruding from Little Meadow Creek where he was fishing. He retrieved the rock and showed it to his father, who was unable to identify its composition. The Reed family used the rock as a doorstop for three years. Finally, John Reed took the rock to a Fayetteville jeweler to be examined. Not realizing its value, he offered to sell the rock to the jeweler for $3.50, who gladly paid the sum. A year later, John Reed recovered about $1,000 from the sale. Reed continued to farm but also started a mining enterprise. He took three men—Frederick Kiser, James Love
and Martin Phifer Jr.—into a partnership. One of James Love’s slaves, Peter, discovered a twenty-eight-pound nugget, valued at $6,600. By 1824, sporadic mining activity on the Reed farm yielded about $100,000 worth of gold. Learning of the discoveries of gold on the Reed farm, other farmers began to dig in their fields, hills and streams, finding gold nuggets of different sizes and values. Gold mining in North Carolina attracted thousands of gold seekers.

  More than a decade before the word “gold” was associated with California, North Carolina was known as “the golden state.”4 By 1832, North Carolina mines employed more than twenty-five thousand people. In the same year, the first US gold dollar coin was minted in North Carolina at the private home of Christopher Bechtler. His business minted $770,000 in gold coins from August 1836 to May 1838.5

  SOUTH CAROLINA GOLD

  Gold was discovered in 1802 in Greenville in the Carolina Slate Belt, extending in a northeast–southeast direction in the same geologic formation as found in North Carolina. In 1829, in Camden, Lancaster County, the largest discovery of gold in South Carolina occurred at the Haile mine. The profit-sharing mine paid $1.50 to $3.00 a day to one to two hundred miners. Gold was shipped to the Philadelphia mint. When gold was discovered in California, a large exodus of miners in the Carolinas reduced mining activity. The downward trend of gold production continued until the Civil War, when President Lincoln ordered General Sherman to destroy the facilities.6

  GEORGIA GOLD

  Gold strikes were reported in Georgia as early as 1823 near Milledgeville and in 1826 at Villa Rica in Carroll County. But “little attention was paid to these discoveries at the time.”7

  In 1828, a hunter, Benjamin Parks, discovered an unusual-looking rock near LickLog in the present Lumpkin County. A gold rush followed with the discovery of gold veins richer than those found in North Carolina. During the Georgia gold rush, LickLog’s name was changed to Dahlonega, the Cherokee word for “yellow money.” Unfortunately for the Cherokees, their land was the site of precious ores, which might have contributed to Jackson’s Indian Removal Act to clear the way for gold miners and cotton farmers. Indian Removal from Cherokee Land coincides with the discovery of gold, though Europeans had long desired to possess the land of the Cherokees due to the developing cotton agriculture. In 1838–39, the Cherokees were removed from their ancestral lands to Indian Territory in Oklahoma.8