The Alabama Gold Belt

Alabama had a gold rush of its own. The gold lies in the igneous and metamorphic rock of the state's Piedmont, in a belt that runs southwest to northeast in line with the Appalachians, and the Wedowee Schist of the northeast, formed as the mountains rose, is known to carry it. The boom took hold in 1836, and through the 1840s it raised whole towns across east-central Alabama, mainly in Tallapoosa, Randolph and Coosa counties.

Arbacoochee in Cleburne County, named for an old Creek town, Abihkuchi, was the great camp of the northeast. By local account gold was found there in 1832, and by 1845 it held some 5,000 people and perhaps 600 miners, with twenty general stores, five saloons, two hotels, two churches, a school, a fire department and a race track. Goldville in northern Tallapoosa, founded in 1842 and named for what it dug, claimed 14 stores and at least 3,000 people. Companies paid between 75 cents and $1.75 a day at the peak in the mid-1840s, and the bigger camps grew gambling halls, saloons and brothels to take it back.

Most Alabama gold comes as small grains rather than nuggets, hard to free from the rock. Miners worked the stream beds and gravels with sluices, sank shafts, and poured liquid mercury into crushed ore to gather the gold as amalgam; later they leached it out with cyanide in big vats. The richest ground of all was Hog Mountain in Tallapoosa County, found in 1839, which alone has yielded about 25,000 ounces, roughly half of all the gold the state has ever produced.

The rush ended in 1849, when news of California emptied the camps; Arbacoochee shrank to a few families, and its post office closed in 1904. Cornish miners hunting copper came over from Tennessee in 1853 and stirred the gold fields again, and there were revivals in the 1880s and in 1903, but none produced large quantities. Abandoned shafts, trenches and old cyanide vats can still be found in some counties, along with groundwater the old methods left contaminated.

Panning is still a popular hobby here. Several gold-bearing streams run through the Talladega National Forest, and others cross private land.