About forty miles west of Atlanta on U.S. 78, is the town of Villa Rica. Its name is Spanish, meaning rich village, so named because it was first settled by gold miners who worked the rich near-by gold fields. The city’s historians claim that the first gold found in Georgia was at Villa Rica in 1826, three years before it was discovered in Dahlonega in 1829. Very few people know that Villa Rica ranked second to Dahlonega in gold production during the gold mining period.
Villa Rica is in the Georgia gold belt which consists of a narrow strip of land extending rather irregularly almost due northeast and southwest across the northern part of Georgia, paralleling the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge mountains. It varies from two to six miles in width and is approximately 150 miles in length, with Lumpkin and White counties containing the richest deposits. The most productive is around Dahlonega. After passing through Cherokee County, the Dahlonega gold belt forks off through Paulding County to make the rich Carroll County gold belt that contains the gold fields around Villa Rica and Carrollton.
THE FIRST GOLD RUSH
This same Georgia gold belt extends through Charlotte, North Carolina, near where in 1799, the first gold rush in North America was started by Conrad Reed, a twelve-year-old boy, who didn’t want to go to Sunday School. On a bright Sunday morning in 1799 Conrad announced he was too sick to accompany his parents to church in Concord. But immediately after they left in their wagon, Conrad went wading in Meadow creek with his bow and arrow. He shot at a bird and missed, his arrow stuck in the ground by a “real purty” yellow rock, which he took home. His mother thought the rock so heavy and attractive that she used it for a doorstop. Visitors to the Reed home admired the unusual rock, which gave Conrad’s father Joel, an idea that he might sell it for some money which the Reeds needed more than a doorstop. So, he took it to town and was delighted when a sharp-eyed jeweler paid him $3.50 for it. Only later did he learn that the “purty” doorstop he had sold was a solid gold nugget weighing 17 pounds and was resold later for $4,000. Today it would be worth $92,000. In 1821 a 50 pound gold nugget was found near where Conrad found his 17 pound “purty” yellow rock.
DAHLONEGA GOLD RUSH
The Dahlonega gold rush started in 1829. On a cold wintry day, Benjamin Parks, a local farmer was out hunting deer on Findley Ridge above the Chestatee River. He stumbled over a quartz rock as he shot at a deer, causing him to miss. In disgust he kicked the rock over and uncovered a chunk of shiny gold as yellow as the yolk of an egg.
THE VILLA RICA GOLD RUSH
According to a frequently repeated and often whispered legend, gold was first found near Villa Rica by a farmer’s wife, Fannie Fields, while she and her husband were picking cotton on their farm near Mud Creek. Mrs. Fields had to go to the bathroom right in the middle of the cotton patch. She started screaming for her husband. He first thought she was bitten by a rattlesnake and ran to her aid. She showed him a gold nugget that she had washed up – probably the first hydraulic mined gold in Georgia!
The news got abroad and, in a few days, settlers began pouring in, on foot, on horseback and in covered wagons. At first men dug for gold everywhere. They were also panning out the branches and digging deep holes in the hillsides. So many rich strikes were made so close together that a mining town of over 2000 population sprung up and came to be called Villa Rica – “City of Riches”. This was actually the town of old Villa Rica and is called “Old Town” today and is located about a mile to the west of the modern town of Villa Rica. For several years it was a lawless and ungovernable community. Finally, law and order was established, streets were laid out, churches, stores, and taverns were built. There were several lawyers, doctors, barbers, saloons and billiard tables – places where a miner could be separated from his gold!
A TON OF GOLD AT CARROLLTON
During this time a bonanza gold strike was made at the Bonner Gold Mine, situated about seven miles southwest of Carrollton on Buffalo Creek. This mine produced about a ton of gold or over 500,000 pennyweights that would be worth $11,250,000 today. The Oak Mountain Gold Mine located about four miles east of Carrollton also did well. These facts are found in Bulletin No. 4-A of the Geological Survey of Georgia, published in 1896, and Bulletin No. 19, “Gold Deposits of Georgia”, by S.P. Jones, 1909 (second report) which are now out of print.
The presence of garnets in considerable quantities in the gneiss at the Bonner Mine is worthy of note. Also, a number of lenses of coarsely banded highly feldspathic gneiss were noticed in intimate association with the gold bearing ore bodies. Some of these may represent true pegmatite dikes. The absence of any basic rocks together with structural relations would suggest an original acidic quartz rock magma as the probable source of the gold in this rich mine. There could still be more gold in the Bonner Mine.
14 GOLD MINES
At the height of the Carroll County gold rush there were 14 gold mines operating around Villa Rica. From 1830 to the Civil War the properties were worked extensively. Old records indicate that about 1000 ounces of gold were taken out annually or nearly $500,000 worth at today’s prices of $450 per ounce.
In addition to the many gold nuggets, much of the gold found near Villa Rica was in the form of gold dust as fine as snuff. Some so fine it would float on water. To recover this fine gold, the gold bearing sands were washed down sluice boxes lined with wool blankets. The light sand and gravel washed over the wool, leaving the fine gold particles caught in the wool cloth. After a period, the wool blankets would be loaded with gold. They would then be dried and burnt, leaving a pile of gold dust in the ashes which could be easily separated. Every process to recover gold, such as stamp mills, mercury coated sheets of copper and cyaniding were employed.
The gold panners put their gold dust into a goose quill which they used as a medium of exchange for provisions. Larger amounts of gold dust and nuggets were carried in saddlebags on horseback, on a long and dangerous trip to the U.S. Mint in Dahlonega where it was coined and returned.
The largest and richest gold mining operations in the Villa Rica gold fields were at Mud Creek and Pine Mountain. Pine Mountain is about three miles northwest of Villa Rica and is in Douglas County. It is a hill which rises about 200 feet above the surrounding country. It is made up of large bodies of quartz, quartz stringers and saprolite.
A GUIDE
In order to get more information about the location and size of the old gold mines around Villa Rica, I decided to visit the area last August and try to find someone who would take me on a tour to the old gold mine sites. I stopped at a farm home where I saw a farmer sitting on his front porch. As I walked up he said, “Welcome stranger, come in and pull up a chair and set a spell”. I introduced myself and the farmer said his name was H.B. Carnes. I asked him what the initials H.B. stood for in his name. He said he hadn’t decided whether they meant Heaven Bound or Hell Bent. His wife brought me a gourd-dipper full of fresh well water and Mr. Carnes offered me a chaw of tobacco. The rural Anglo-Saxon farmers of Georgia are the best people in the world. They are generous, warm-hearted, honest and the hospitality is unequalled. Since I was raised on a farm among these people I felt perfectly at home. My wife has never broke me from saying “you all”.
Mr. Carnes said he knew where all the old gold mines were because he had worked in many of them when he was a young man and offered to take me on a tour. We first visited Pine Mountain Gold Mine. We walked up a deep long cut where Mr. Carnes wiggled his lanky frame over a pile of orange and Yellow rocks at the entrance of an abandoned mine tunnel. He turned to caution me, “We will go slow right here, it’s a good place for rattlesnakes”. Kicking the rocks with a heavy boot he satisfied himself and me, that there were no rattlers around. Then he inched himself forward out of the hot afternoon sun into the tunnel’s cool black mouth. Stooping and squatting through tight spots we picked our way over rotted collapsed timbers. The patch of daylight at our backs grew smaller and disappeared, and the inky black ahead was pushed back by our flashlights. Now and then he chipped the wall with my rock hammer. At one spot he shined his light on loose rocks overhead and warns, “We call them widow-makers, don’t hit or touch those”. At another spot he exclaims, “Wow, that’s good gold ore. I don’t understand why they didn’t mine it”.
Then he took me to the back side of Pine Mountain to the site of what was once a huge gold processing plant. All the buildings and machinery were long gone – only concrete foundations of the huge machinery remains. He said that in 1915, a scientific mining engineer of German descent by the name of T.H. Aldrich came to Pine Mountain. He spent enormous sums of money erecting large rock crushers, stamp mills, ball mills, steam engines, steam boilers, large buildings and a number of 50 foot diameter open top circular concrete tanks about 20 ft. deep to treat the gold ore with sodium cyanide to dissolve the gold from the rock. He blasted and dug out the gold bearing rocks and processed them through his plant. He was able to recover an appreciable amount of gold, but no one ever knew how much. He operated until 1926 and closed down. Today all that remains are the concrete foundations of the buildings. All machinery and buildings are gone. The many large cyanide concrete tanks remain and what is left of a burnt out sumptuous German castle-like home and the deep canyons cut into Pine Mountain.
Necessity of excessive expenditures and bad management caused many of the Villa Rica gold mines to cease operation. Today not a single mine is in operation throughout the territory.
On our way back we visited the Sulphur Mining and Railroad Company’s Mine, known commonly as the Sulphur Mine which is three miles from Villa Rica on the Dallas Highway. It is actually an iron pyrite mine like the “Little Bob” at Dallas. It was discovered by copper prospectors before the Civil War. It was opened as a pyrite mine in 1890 and was operated by the Virginia Carolina Chemical Co. It was one of the largest mines in Georgia and employed over 100 men at $1.50 per day for 10 hours work. The mine shaft was 500 feet deep with four 500 feet tunnels going east and west leading from the main shaft. Four to five carloads of pyrite ore were shipped daily to be made into sulphuric acid. The mine ceased operation in 1920 because the old enemy of all deep mines – water flooded the deep tunnels faster than it could be pumped out. In the dump piles of this flooded mine were found small clear red garnets well crystallized. They came from a garnetiferous gneiss made up of quartz, feldspar, biotite, garnet and little pyrite stringers.
On leaving Mr. H.B. Carnes, he gave me a quart of excellent wine he had made from his concord grapes and a load of fresh vegetables which confirmed my conviction that the rural country people of Georgia are the salt of the earth.