SYMHC Classics: Georgia Gold Rush

Summary

Podcast Summary: SYMHC Classics – Georgia Gold Rush

Podcast: Stuff You Missed in History Class
Hosts: Holly Frey & Tracy V. Wilson
Episode Date: November 15, 2025 (Classic from August 27, 2018)
Theme: An exploration into the history of the Georgia Gold Rush, its disputed origins, impact on native populations (especially the Cherokee), and the longer arc of gold mining and economic consequences for Georgia and the U.S.

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the Georgia Gold Rush, often overlooked in comparison to the more famous California Gold Rush. Holly and Tracy discuss the often-contested stories of gold’s discovery in Georgia, examine the subsequent growth of mining towns, address the dispossession of the Cherokee Nation, and follow the economic ramifications of early gold mining—including the establishment and ultimate decline of Georgia’s gold industry.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Context and Significance

• Local Roots: Holly shares her own lack of knowledge about Georgia’s gold rush until adulthood, noting that for Georgians, especially schoolchildren, it’s a familiar part of state history.
  • "If you grew up in Georgia, you probably knew this was a thing." (Holly, 03:45)
• Historical Importance: The Georgia Gold Rush predates the California Gold Rush by almost 20 years and was the first significant gold rush in U.S. history.

2. The Murky Origins of the Georgia Gold Rush

• Contested “Discovery” Stories:
  • Multiple individuals are credited with finding the first gold: Benjamin Parks (typically cited), Jesse Hogan, John Witherudes, and a man named Logan with an enslaved worker, among others.
  • Benjamin Parks’ famous but disputed account: He claimed to have found a gold nugget on his land in 1828 (though he later changed the date to 1827), but the dates and ownership records are questionable.
    • "While he claimed that he had made nearly $24,000 in gold finds on his property when he sold that land a year later, the new owner only managed to find a very small amount." (Holly, 06:05)
  • Aging Memory cautioned: Parks’ story gained traction after a newspaper interview in his 90s, 60 years after the events—a reminder of the unreliability of distant recollections.
    • "People really do hold that up as...No, but we have an eyewitness account, and I'm like, that's a lot of time." (Holly, 06:54; Tracy, 07:02)
• Early Awareness of Gold: Indigenous populations and European explorers were aware of gold deposits in North Georgia long before the “rush.” (Tracy, 04:34)

3. Gold Fever Grips Georgia

• First Public Announcements: On August 1, 1829, the Georgia Journal publicized the discovery of gold mines, prompting an influx of prospectors called the “29ers.” (Tracy, 08:04)
• Mining Methods: Early efforts relied on placer mining (panning for alluvial gold), but larger and more industrial mining followed.
  • "You didn't need much equipment for this kind of gold hunting, so solo prospectors could just sort of follow their instincts..." (Holly, 09:15)

4. The Cherokee Nation and Land Seizure

• Gold on Cherokee Land: The primary gold deposits lay within the Cherokee Nation, intensifying white settlers’ desire to force removal of the native population.
• Georgia’s Oppressive Legislation: In 1828, Georgia passed laws stripping Cherokee of legal rights, making abuses by white settlers unpunishable.
  • "Native Americans could not bring a legal suit against a white man, nor could a Native American be a witness..." (Holly, 10:11)
• Legal Challenges:
  • Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia (1831): Supreme Court denied that the Cherokee were a foreign state with the right to sue in U.S. courts.
    • "If it be true that the Cherokee Nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted." – Chief Justice John Marshall (Tracy quoting, 15:08)
  • Worcester vs. Georgia (1832): Supreme Court ruled that states couldn’t overrule treaties and agreements with Native Nations, affirming Cherokee sovereignty on paper, though not in effect.
    • "The Cherokee peoples were a nation of 'distinct independent political communities, retaining their original natural rights...'" (Holly, 17:14)
• The Trail of Tears: Despite legal decisions, forced removal (Indian Removal Act of 1830) commenced, culminating in the Trail of Tears in 1838.
• Land Lotteries: Georgia parceled out Cherokee land to white settlers via lotteries—exclusively for non-Native applicants.

5. Notable Figures and Stories

• Mary G. Franklin: One of the few women to benefit from the lottery, she started her own successful mining operation instead of selling her 40-acre parcel.
  • "She sent them packing, deciding that she and her family would work the land themselves." (Tracy, 19:34)
• Lottery Flipping: Some “lucky winners” flipped their $10 tickets for much higher sums, while the original owners (Cherokee) were wholly excluded.

6. Economic Outcomes and Attempts at Minting

• Gold Transport: From 1830-1837, about $2 million in gold was sent from Georgia to Philadelphia to be minted.
• Private Mints: Templeton Reed ran the first private gold press in Gainesville—closed shortly afterward due to accusations over purity levels (his coins were ~95% gold).
• Federal Reforms:
  • Coinage Act (1834): Established gold and silver content standards and expedited payment for gold deposits.
  • Mint Act (1835): Pittsburgh, Charlotte, and Dahlonega received US Mint branches; Dahlonega finally began minting in 1838, but by then, most of Georgia’s gold was exhausted.

7. The Rush Declines and Legacy

• Fading Fortunes: By the time the Dahlonega Mint opened, gold finds had dwindled.
  • "The Georgia Gold Rush had largely played itself out." (Tracy, 28:38)
• “There’s gold in them thar hills!”
  • Mark Twain’s famous phrase is traced to state geologist Matthew Stevenson—“there is still gold in the hills”—which got colorfully reworded by Twain. (Holly & Tracy, 28:38-29:12)
• Afterlife: Minor revivals occurred circa 1900 and in the 1930s, but they were short-lived and not profitable.
• Present Day: The historic Lumpkin County Courthouse houses the Dahlonega Gold Museum, with local bricks even containing flecks of gold.
  • "It's now a historic site and is part of the State park service." (Tracy, 30:22)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Fuzzy Historical Memory:
  • Tracy: "I don't remember what happened yesterday, let alone when I am 90. Will I remember accurately what happened when I was 30?" (07:02)
• On Exclusion and Injustice:
  • Holly (on Cherokee legal status): "The legal door was open for Cherokees to be abused by white citizens with absolutely no legal recourse." (10:14)
• On the End of the Rush:
  • Tracy: "The Georgia Gold Rush had largely played itself out." (28:38)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [03:45] – Local awareness and context for the Georgia Gold Rush
• [04:34] – Competition and mythology around discovery stories
• [06:31] – Benjamin Parks’ oral history and questions of reliability
• [08:04] – First media announcement of gold in Georgia
• [09:42] – Gold found on Cherokee land; rising removal efforts
• [10:11] – State laws disenfranchising Cherokee people
• [15:08] – Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia decision
• [17:14] – Worcester vs. Georgia decision
• [18:51] – Details of the Georgia land lottery system
• [19:34] – Mary G. Franklin and successful gold lot operation
• [20:34] – Economic flow: gold to Philadelphia for minting
• [25:28] – Templeton Reed’s private mint and consequences
• [27:24] – Federal coinage reforms
• [28:38] – Decline of gold finds and the opening of the Dahlonega Mint
• [29:12] – “There’s gold in them thar hills!” and folkloric legacy
• [30:22] – Dahlonega Gold Museum as a historical site today

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Tone & Style

The hosts maintain a conversational, often humorous, and accessible tone even as they discuss the weighty topics of dispossession and legal injustice. They poke fun at their own regional knowledge gaps and include honest reflections on the complexities of remembering and interpreting history.

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Conclusion

This episode provides a comprehensive look at the rise and fall of Georgia’s gold rush, illuminating the economic, legal, and moral complexities underpinning a “boom” that forever changed the region. The hosts underscore the distressing effects on the Cherokee people, making clear that gold fever in Georgia is inextricable from one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history. For natives and non-natives alike, the Georgia Gold Rush is a case study in the ways economic opportunity and injustice can become intertwined—and a reminder that “firsts” in American history often come at unseen costs.

Transcript

[Tracy B. Wilson]

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[Tracy B. Wilson]

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[Tracy B. Wilson]

It's the season to come together over your holiday favorites at Starbucks. Warm up with a creamy caramel brulee latte, get festive with an iced gingerbread chai, or share a velvety peppermint mocha. Together is the best place to be at Starbucks. Happy Saturday. Today's classic is on the Georgia Gold Rush, which has some connections to our recent episode on Marigold or Ross. Specifically, it gives a little bit more detail on state and federal efforts to remove the Cherokee from North Georgia in the early 19th century.

[Host of Silver Linings with the Old Gays]

When this episode initially came out, we got some messages from listeners about whether the 1799 discovery of gold in North Carolina, which we mentioned in this episode, should have been described as the first Gold Rush in the US Rather than.

[Holly Fry]

The Georgia Gold Rush. And the answer is maybe the initial.

[Host of Silver Linings with the Old Gays]

Discovery in North Carolina definitely predated the discovery that sparked the Georgia Gold Rush. But the biggest peak of the rush in North Carolina was mostly after the big Rush in Georgia.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Yeah, and it's often difficult to conclusively say which thing was first when there were various gold discoveries in the us. Also, please pardon our mispronunciation of placer mining, something we actually mispronounced again in another episode after this one, before someone brought it to our attention that it is not pronounced placer like it looks like it would be said based on how it is spelled.

[Host of Silver Linings with the Old Gays]

This episode originally came out on August 27, 2018.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Enjoy.

[Holly Fry]

Welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Host of Silver Linings with the Old Gays]

Hello and welcome to the podcast.

[Holly Fry]

I'm Holly Fry.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

And I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and today's.

[Holly Fry]

Episode is a bit of history that is local to me and our offices in Atlanta, but I will confess a whole big blind spot in my historical knowledge about it. I had only the vaguest idea about.

[Host of Silver Linings with the Old Gays]

There having been gold mining in Georgia.

[Holly Fry]

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 Dahlonega to learn about it and they gave us little pieces of gold and I was like, I didn't grow up here and I had no idea. So if you grew up in Georgia, you probably knew this was a thing.

[Host of Silver Linings with the Old Gays]

But it is also tied to some.

[Holly Fry]

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, so it's worth examining. And it also predates the California Gold Rush, which was of course a much bigger 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 Levi Strauss episode, but Georgia's, which happened 20 years earlier, was the first gold rush in US history. So that is what we are talking about today.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

How the Gold Rush started in Georgia is something of a mystery. There are competing stories 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 1800s. 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 1500s. English explorers followed, and before them there were Native Americans in 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.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, this was. While the rush is predicated on new discoveries of what they thought were going to be really productive lines, people knew already that there was gold in the area. But as for the 19th 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 27, 1828, he found a nugget of gold simply on the ground at a place on his property in the county seat, which was known as Licklog at the time that was refounded as Dahlonega in 1833 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 1827. But this proved problematic as he almost immediately leased that land to a mining operation. But he didn't own that patch of land until mid-1828. 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 $24,000 in gold fines on his property when he sold that land a year later, the new owner only managed to find a very small amount.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

One of the reasons that Parks story has been cited so often is because he gave an interview to the Atlanta Constitution in 1894 about the discovery of gold in the state and the population boom that followed it. While this is often held up as a firsthand account, it's important to remember that Parks was in his 90s by that point. Six decades had passed since the time of the Georgia gold rush.

[Holly Fry]

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.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

I don't remember what happened yesterday, let alone when I am 90. Will I remember accurately what happened when I was 30? Oh, yeah.

[Holly Fry]

I mean, we. I have that moment all the time with friends or my spouse where we'll talk about some event that happened even, like, a couple 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 Ward's Creek. And yet another story is that a man named John Witherudes found the first piece of gold in Dukes 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 gold in 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.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

On August 1, 1829, the Georgia Journal of Milledgeville, Georgia, ran a notice that the paper had been informed that, quote, two gold mines have just been discovered in this county and preparations are making to bring these hidden treasures of the earth.

[Holly Fry]

To use stories of alluvial gold. That term alluvial doesn't necessarily mean this, but it's come to mean it in terms of gold. That's the gold that's found through panning on a river rather than mining, because it has theoretically moved down a mountain through streams and through melting water or ice that melted into water. 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.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

At this point, there had been gold vines in the Carolinas already, which I know about, because while Holly's husband was taking field trips to Dahlonega, I was taking field trips to Reed Gold Mine in North Carolina. This was the beginning of public knowledge that there was gold in Georgia as well. But by the fall, there were gold mines scattered all through north Georgia, and independent prospectors had inundated the area. The first wave of gold hunters to move into the newly identified mining area were known as the 29ers.

[Holly Fry]

And many of these early prospectors were involved in placer or deposit mining, meaning digging or panning for gold that 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 ore in tunnels dug underground.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

The specific area where the gold was found was in part of the Cherokee nation. While Cherokee peoples had lived in the Southeast for hundreds of years, long before the white settlers, by the 1820s, 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 simply take that land away in the interest of financial gain for the non native peoples.

[Holly Fry]

In 1828, the state of Georgia passed 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 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 peoples out of the area, they had just grown tired of waiting and so they basically wanted to make it miserable for any Cherokee who lived within state lines.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

We'll get to the Cherokee Nation response to this action, but first we are going to pause and have a quick word from one of our sponsors.

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[Holly Fry]

So we had just talked about these laws that have been passed in Georgia to make life very difficult for Cherokee peoples living there, and in response, the Cherokee Nation sought an injunction against those laws from the supreme court. Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia claimed that these new laws violated the treaties that were in place and had been negotiated between the Cherokee and the United States.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

In the opinion written by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, he stated, quote, the Court has bestowed its best attention on this 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 the Cherokee Nation 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 denied.

[Holly Fry]

The Indian removal Act of 1830 was signed by President Andrew Jackson, who had been elected in 1828, 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 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 1831, knowing the federal government wouldn't interfere, surveyors began measuring the Cherokee land to be sectioned into plots for disbursement to white citizens.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

In 1832, there was another court case that led the Supreme Court to examine the relationship between Native American nation and the state and federal government with the case of Worcester vs. Georgia that went to the United States Supreme Court. In that case, a missionary named Samuel Austin Worcester was arrested for breaking a newly enacted Georgia law that prohibited white missionaries from living on Cherokee land. Worcester 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.

[Holly Fry]

In a surprising contrast to the language in the denial of injunction that Marshall wrote in relation to Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia, the finding in Worcester vs. Georgia indicated that the Cherokee peoples 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.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

This was a victory on paper, but it didn't actually help the Cherokee retain their land. Forcible removal began in 1838. But already, and going back to 1830, the state of Georgia had managed to seize parts of the Cherokee Nation and then redistribute it in parcels to white citizens.

[Holly Fry]

That court case, Worcester vs. Georgia, has actually been cited so many times as the recognition of the fact that Native American nations existed distinctly and should have their own rights. 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 1832. This was one of eight land lotteries in the state of Georgia that took place between 1805 and 1833. So for $10, a hopeful landowner could enter the lottery, and their name was then put on a piece of paper and added to barrel of possible draws. And then lot numbers for the available parcels were put into a second barrel. So a name and a lot number were drawn each time to match winners up with their new land holdings.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

If they were drawn in one of the two 1832 lotteries which redistributed the Cherokee land, they would be issued a tract of land amounting to 40 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.

[Holly Fry]

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 $10 for his lottery ticket into 10,000 by immediately selling his newly acquired property. And Native Americans were barred from participating in the lottery, so there was no way that any of them could gain any land back.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

One of the lottery winners in 1832 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 allotted her 40 acres. She did not 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.

[Holly Fry]

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 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 mines take was continues to be debated. A figure of $1,000 per day is often mentioned, but that is a completely unverified number.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

From 1830 to 1837, almost $2 million worth of gold was moved from North Georgia to Philadelphia to be minted. Any gold finds were normally assessed at a local branch of the mint, and then the mint would issue a certificate to the owner that declared the value of the gold that had been submitted.

[Holly Fry]

And at that point, the owner had a number of options. They could exchange that certificate for 80% 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 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.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Philadelphia and verified that 80% cash value option used the 20% 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 80% in cash and then get the other 20% after the Philadelphia Mint had completed its assessment.

[Holly Fry]

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 that followed following this quick little break for a sponsor that keeps our show going.

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[Kal Penn]

Hey audiobook lovers. This week on the podcast I'm sitting down with musician, producer and walking encyclop Questlove. We're talking about Mark Ronson's memoir Night how to be a DJ in 90s New York City. All right, like we talked about before, Mark Ronson found sanctuary in the DJ booth. What's a tool or piece of equipment in the studio or on stage that gives you the most control?

[Questlove]

So I have two microphones on stage. We have the microphone that you hear as the audience. Then we have a second microphone in which we communicate with each other. I feel like that second microphone kind of saved all of our friendships. No, no band likes each other. After 20 years or 25 years like the Beatles broke up in seven and a half years and we're going on 35.

[Kal Penn]

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[Host of Silver Linings with the Old Gays]

Listen to your elders, honey. You might know them from their viral videos. But now the Old Gays pull back the curtain on their podcast Silver Linings with the Old Gays, brought to you in partnership with I Hearts, Ruby Studio and Veeve Healthcare For a very special bonus episode, hosts Robert, Mick, Bill and Ja' Sa talk about how pride has evolved over the years and their favorite memories, all in celebration of Palm Springs Pride because pride should be celebrated all year round. Listen to these fabulous friends swap stories exploring how queer life has evolved over the decades and the silver linings they've collected along the way. Each episode dives into hot topics, from safe sex and online dating to untangling Gen Z lingo, as well as insights on how music, art and fashion show up in queer culture. So check out Silver Linings, a show about how pride ages like fine wine, available on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Holly Fry]

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 the mint of a silversmith named Templeton Reed, who went by the name Temple, and he set up a small mint in Gainesville, Georgia, and he pressed coins into $2.50, $5 and $10 denominations.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

The requirement for a pressed gold coin was that it had to contain 99% gold, and soon after Reed started his enterprise he was accused of shorting his coins by adding filler. This caused all kinds of problems for Reed, and after beginning operation in mid July of 1830, by mid October of the same year the Reed Mint was closed. Incidentally, the gold coins that were pressed by Reed, which later were tested and found to contain only 95% gold, are now highly sought after by collectors.

[Holly Fry]

There are not a Lot of them running around, and people want them. In 1831, another mint, not as close to the Georgia gold finds as Reed's Gainesville Press, but closer than Philadelphia, opened in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, and that mint was run by a man named Christopher Bechler. Unlike Reid, his enterprise had some longevity. Bechler ran his mint for almost 20 years until 1850, and he did not grapple with accusations of improperly minted coins as reed had.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

On June 28, 1834, President Andrew Jackson signed the Coinage act of 1834. This act sets specific quantities of metal to be included in coinage and also stated that, quote, all standard gold or silver deposited for coinage after 31st 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, 1/2 of 1 per centum.

[Holly Fry]

This made the process of getting minted coin cash money for a gold deposit much faster and easier, and it got rid of that 20% value deduction that people would previously had to have taken if they wanted the value of their gold in cash right away.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

On March 3 of the following year, the Mint act of 1835 established new mints in 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 that branches of the Mint of the United States shall be established as 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 Dahlonega in Lumpkin county in the state of Georgia, also for the coinage of gold only.

[Holly Fry]

The establishment of the Dahlonega Mint in 1835 was the result of an effort that had actually begun in 1833 to try to address the ongoing needs of the area and its gold miners. But even so, that wasn't an active office until 1838, when it was finally able to start accepting gold deposits. It opened on February 12, 1838, and pressed its first gold coins the following April.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

The irony is that 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 miners 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 1892 novel the American Claimant, is said to be Paraphrasing Stevenson when he utters the famous line, there's gold in them. Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

The quote from Stevenson is, much less.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Much less them thar.

[Holly Fry]

Much less them thar. It was kind of like, hey there, I believe there are still gold and there's still gold in the hills. Then by the time it was told to Mark Twain, he got it secondhand. And by the time he wrote it as a character, it got a little more color, we'll say. And in the late 1840s 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 1850s, the gold rush was more or less over in Georgia. And the Dahlonega mint closed in 1860.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

A second brief gold rush came and went at the turn of the century. Advancements in technology enabled some early finds, but long term profitability eluded the companies who were trying to operate in the area.

[Holly Fry]

And there was another very short 1930s gold mining effort in Georgia in what looked like it could be a post Depression rebound. Some mines, 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.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Today, the Lumpkin County Courthouse that was built in 1836 is now home to the Dahlonega 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 is part of the State park service.

[Holly Fry]

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.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Yeah, I've been to Dahlonega a few times and I can't recall if I've actually gone into the museum. I know I have been adjacent to it.

[Holly Fry]

I do not think I have ever been to Dahlonega, which probably speaks horribly of me because it is like a, a 30 minute drive from my house.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

It's really pretty.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, I just have never had occasion to make the drive out there. Maybe now I will.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is historypodcastheartradio.com and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

[Shaquille O'Neal (Shaq)]

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This information is provided by Lilly, A Medicine company.

[Kal Penn]

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[Tracy B. Wilson]

I'm Ed Helms.

[Kal Penn]

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[Shaquille O'Neal (Shaq)]

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[Tracy B. Wilson]

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[Kal Penn]

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[Holly Fry]

If you're planning on taking a family.

[Host of Silver Linings with the Old Gays]

Trip to Orlando this summer to be transported to magical universes, well, you should know there's one portal you don't want to miss. Your portal to the original universe Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, where they have flying dragons too. It's about science where no spells are required. Walk beneath a towering Falcon 9 booster, touch a real moon rock, and come face to face with space shuttle Atlantis. Plus, take the behind the Gates bus tour for an exclusive look at NASA's legendary launch sites and the future of space exploration. Visitors also have the chance to meet an astronaut, talk about a core memory in the making. And get this. Our friends at Kennedy Space center have offered our listeners $7 off admission. Just use code HISTORY7 at checkout. With missions to Mars, rocket launches, and deep space exploration, no trip to Orlando is complete without landing at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. Discover something real.

[Tracy B. Wilson]

This is an iHeart podcast.