Appalachian History

"The gold," he mused; "yes, I will come to that. It was just by accident that I came across it; the site is now that of the Calhoun Mine. I was deer hunting, one day, when I kicked up something that caught my eye. I examined it, and decided that it was gold. The place belonged to Rev. Mr. Obarr, who, though a preacher, was a hard man, and very desperate.

Engraving of gold miners in Georgia. Artist unknown. From "Gold-Mining in Georgia," Harper's New Monthly Magazine,(June to November 1879): p. 519.

"I went to him, and told him that I thought I could find gold on his place if he would give me a lease of it. He laughed, as though he did not believe me, and consented. So a lease for forty years was written out, the consideration of which was that I was to give him one fourth of the gold mined. I took into partnership a friend in whom I had confidence. I went over to the spot with a pan, and turning over some earth it looked like the yellow of an egg. It was more than my eyes could believe.

"The news got abroad and such excitement you never saw. It seemed within a few days as if the whole world must have heard of it, for men came from every State I had ever heard of. They came afoot, on horseback, and in wagons, acting more like crazy men than anything else. All the way from where Dahlonega now stands to Nuckollsville there were men panning out of the branches and making holes in the hillsides. The saddest man in the county was Preacher Obarr from whom I had leased the land. He thought the lease was a joke but now he found out that it was in earnest.

"One day he came to me and said:

"'Mr. Parks, I want your lease.'

"' But I will not sell it to you,' I replied.

"'Why not?' he asked.

"'Well,' I answered, 'even if I were willing, it is now out of my power, for I have taken a partner, and I know he would never consent to it. I have given him my word and I will keep it.'

"'You will suffer for this, yet,' said Obarr, menacingly, as he went away.

"Two weeks later I saw a party of two women and two men approaching. I knew it was Obarr's family, intent upon trouble. Knowing Obarr's fondness for litigation, I warned my men to hold their own, but to take no offensive step.

"'Mr. Parks,' were Obarr's first words, 'I want that mine.'

"'If you were to pay me ten times its value.' I replied, 'I would not sell it to you.'

"'Well, the longest pole will knock off the persimmon,' he said threateningly.

"At that moment Mrs. Obarr broke the sluice gates to let out the water. A laborer was in the ditch and the woman threw rocks in the water in order to splash him. Failing to make him aggressive, she burst into tears; when her son advanced to attack him I caught him by the collar and flung him back.

"Then the party went off, swore out warrants against us, and had us all arrested. All this was done for intimidation, but it failed to work, and the next thing I heard was that Obarr had sold the place to Judge Underwood, who in turn sold it to Senator John C Calhoun of South Carolina, and then I lost a fortune.

"Senator Calhoun wanted to buy my lease, and I sold it for what I thought was a good price. The very first month after the sale he took out 24,000 pennyweights of gold, and then I was inclined to be as mad with him as Obarr had been with me. But that is the peculiarity of gold mining. You will go day after day exhausting your means and your strength until you give it up. Then the first man who touches the spot, finds the gold the first opening he makes. It is just like gambling; all luck."


---Benjamin Parks, from an 1894 interview in the Atlanta Constitution. Parks is said by some to be the person who discovered gold in Georgia in 1828, west of the Chestatee River in Lumpkin County.


source: "A preliminary report on a part of the gold deposits of Georgia, Bulletin No. 4-A," by William Smith Yeates and Samuel Washington McCallie, Geological Survey of Georgia, 1896

Here's a letter written by one George A. Barrows to a Lewis ______ (perhaps Coleman) in Seattle, Washington, dated June 16, 1901. It's from the James B. Frazier Papers Collection in the University of Tennessee Special Collections Library. James Beriah Frazier (1856-1937) was admitted to the Tennessee bar in 1881, and began his practice in Chattanooga. This partially explains the presence of this letter in Frazier's possession: Barrows (1863-1909) got his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1885, and during the next three years practiced law in Chattanooga. So they traveled in the same circles, and clearly were friends.

"[Barrows] was also largely interested in real estate matters in that city," says his obituary, "but with the decline in prices in 1888 disaster overtook him and many others, and he returned to Philadelphia."

Frazier & Barrows must have remained in contact after Barrows left Chattanooga in order for this letter to find its way back to Frazier after Barrows died. But we don't know the identity of 'Lewis,' the letter's recipient, and his connection to the other two men.

Why is this letter relevant to Appalachian history? It captures perfectly the gold fever that swept the region and the nation shortly after the yellow nuggets were discovered in Alaska's Yukon. News reached the United States in July 1897 at the height of a significant series of financial recessions and bank failures, and held out hope for adventurers willing to try their luck.

Barrows first lit out for the gold fields in May, 1899 with a government expedition, under Captain E. F. Glenn, to Cook Inlet, Alaska. By that point in his life he'd left the law, gone back to school and become a doctor. The following November he sailed for Nome as a surgeon on the Laurada. The ship sprang a leak in Bering Sea and went to pieces on St. George Island, but everyone on board was rescued.

-----

Dear Lewis: Many thanks for your long and very interesting letter. I am very glad the news personal to yourself is so good. A man of family, of position and of aldermanic proportions, you are certainly in luck. May all sorts of good fortune continue.

Klondike prospectors, no date.

I hardly know how to start to tell you of my very eventful career during the last few years. I have not time now to write a book, so will send you my diaries of '98 and '99 wherein you will see among other things how I was twice wrecked at sea, on one occasion being cast away on an island in Behring [sic] Sea.

As soon as I stopped keeping a diary I stopped getting ship wrecked. Last summer I was Ship Surgeon on a large Steamship--the "Oregon"--running between Seattle and Cape Nome. A great deal happened then but I have no record of it and it would take too long to tell.

Since last Fall I have been teaching Obstetrics and Diagnosis of diseases in an Institute here; but this job is now over - for the summer vacation - and we are "up against it" again almost as badly as when we struck Seattle. I hoped to get the "Oregon" again this summer - but a doctor who is a great friend of the owner has thus far euchered [sic] me out of it.

You see I am as far off as ever from my "Four Million," although the experience I have had may sometime help me to get it. I know Alaska pretty well and how they work the ropes there, very well. The country is full of gold and if we are ever so fixed that we could get there - with the means to stay a year or two - I believe the "Four" would be on the way.

One must winter there in order to get a chance at new diggings before news of them reaches the States. Before the rush of people to Nome got there every valuable claim had been taken up by men who had wintered up the Yukon.

The Laurada in 1896, courtesy of Illustrated American Magazine.

People who are not Capitalists who go in for the summer, invariably, are sorry -- others too, for that matter, who lack necessary knowledge and judgment. This is a great country out here. You ought to take a long vacation sometime and come out and see what God’s country really is like. Magnificent scenery and climate, living cheap, things civilized and a bracing move and get-up to affairs that would make the effete East hold its breath. Let me hear from you soon. No hurry about returning the diaries.

Your sincere friend Geo. A. Barrows. 16 June 1901.


Sources: James B. Frazier Papers / University of Tennessee Special Collections Library at http://idserver.utk.edu/?id=200800000003486

OBITUARY RECORD OF GRADUATES OF YALE UNIVERSITY DECEASED FROM JUNE, 1910, TO JULY, 1915, No. i of the Sixth Printed Series, and No. 70 of the whole Record at www.archive.org/stream/1910t15obituary00yaleuoft/1910t15obituary00yaleuoft_djvu.txt

It was the original Gold Rush, and it kicked off 21 years before the California event we usually associate with that phrase. Gold fever raged in Lumpkin County, GA till the close of the nineteenth century, and Dahlonega attorney Wier Boyd placed himself in the midst of the myriad legal dealings.

Boyd was admitted to the bar in 1856, and later represented his county and district in both branches of the Georgia legislature. He and his son Marion formed Boyd & Boyd in 1870 and acted as a broker, collector and liaison for a number of mining clients.

Correspondence to Colonel Boyd (he served in the Civil War) now online at the Digital Library of Georgia documents the activities of the Rider Mine (1868-1883), the Yahoola and Cane Creek Hydraulic Mining Company (1868-1883), the Consolidated Mines (1879-1882), and the Phoenix Gold Mining company (1891-1892).

Here’s a typical example, a letter from an F. E. Dickie, secretary of the Phoenix Gold Mining Company, to Wier Boyd, dated April 28, 1892. Dickie promises to pay Boyd for costs associated with preparing the Exter v. Etowah Gold Mining Company case for argument before the Supreme Court.

Dickie asks to compare Boyd's bill of exceptions with that of his own lawyer in preparation for the case. He argues that because F. C. Exter accepted stock in lieu of monetary compensation, he does not have a valid claim against Etowah Gold Mining Company for monetary compensation. On those grounds, Dickie believes they can get the case dismissed.

Your favor of the 25th inst [instant] at hand and noted. In reply will say, please prepare the case for the Supreme Court, and on Monday or Tuesday of next week I will send you a check for $50 to pay costs in the matter.

When you have prepared your bill of exceptions inasmuch as the suit that we contemplate bringing at this end against the old management might be affected by the suit at your place, if agreeable I wish you would forward the bill to me so that I could refer it to my lawyer who being more thoroughly acquainted with the whole matter might be able to suggest some things that would benefit us in our suit here and which could be put in the bill of exceptions as prepared by you. I think we would have time to do this.

In regard to President Cheney will say, that we must go to the Supreme Court without his appearing in the case at all. We do not question the employment of Mr. Exter, but we do question the consideration that he claimed for the employment; his consideration for the employment was the large amount of stock that he held and for which he did not pay a nickel. If he did not receive the stock then he would be entitled to a money consideration, but he did accept the stock, and as you will notice in his testimony swore to having sold some of it and kept the proceeds. This of itself ought to be sufficient to throw his case out. We can prove by the Vice President that he was to receive nothing as Gen'l [General] Manager, except as stated above.


Yours truly,
F. E. Dickie

Gold mining continued on a limited scale in Dahlonega until the turn of the twentieth century, when the advent of new mining technologies gave rise to a flurry of new activity. Amory Dexter, a gold mining entrepreneur with business interests in Dahlonega, had alluded in letters to Wier Boyd that board members of the Yahoola Mining Company of Boston, MA would probably decide to erect a mill in Dahlonega.

Construction of the Consolidated Gold Mining Company began in Dahlonega in 1899, during a revived interest in the area's gold. The company was the largest gold-processing plant east of the Mississippi River.

Several companies did indeed set up new gold-processing plants locally. The one erected by the Dahlonega Consolidated Gold Mining Company in 1899 on Yahoola Creek was the largest ever built east of the Mississippi River. None of the operations were able to turn a profit, though, and they soon went out of business.

Wier Boyd did not live to see that turn of events. In November of 1893, in company with his son, he was returning from an inspection trip to one of his gold mines on the outskirts of town. In front of the residence of E. E. Crisson, on Clarkesville Street, Col. Boyd suddenly exclaimed that he was very sick; and as he spoke, he dropped dead.


Sources: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/%7Elgboyd/chapter4.htm
www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-785&pid=s-60
http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/dahlonega/mka016.php



Wier+Boyd Dahlonega+Ga Lumpkin+County+Ga gold+mining appalachia +appalachian+history