Reed Gold Mine, where it started

The first documented US gold find, used as a doorstop for three years

The Reed Gold Mine at Midland, in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, about 12 miles south-east of Concord, is where gold mining in the United States began. John Reed, born Johannes Reith, was a Hessian soldier who deserted the British army outside Savannah in 1782, made his way to the German farming community of the Carolina Piedmont, and settled down to grow corn and wheat. One Sunday in 1799 his 12-year-old son Conrad found a large yellow rock in Little Meadow Creek on the farm. It weighed about 17 pounds, and for three years it held the door of the Reed house open.

In 1802 a jeweller in Fayetteville recognised it as gold and told Reed to name his price. Reed asked $3.50, about a week's wages, and got it, one-tenth of one percent of what the nugget was worth. The next year he went into partnership with three neighbours, who supplied equipment and enslaved men while Reed supplied the land, and they worked the creek bed in the off-season from farming. Before the first year was out an enslaved boy named Peter turned up a 28-pound nugget, still the largest found at Reed and the largest ever found east of the Mississippi.

Word spread up and down the Piedmont, farmers began panning their own creeks, and skilled Cornish miners came to join them. After 1825, when gold was found in veins of white quartz, the search went underground, and Reed began lode mining in 1831; a family quarrel and a court injunction then shut the mine for a decade. In its peak years gold mining employed more North Carolinians than anything but farming, the state recovered more than a million dollars a year, and the Charlotte Mint was built to coin it. North Carolina led the nation in gold until the great rush to California in 1848. Reed died rich in 1845.

The mine kept going in fits and starts. Around 1854 its workings were greatly enlarged and a steam-powered engine house built. In 1895 the Kelly family of Springfield, Ohio, bought it and sank shafts to 150 feet without finding the veins they hoped for, though in April 1896 a group of local men dug up a 23-pound nugget, sold for $4,800. Underground mining ended in 1912.

The state opened Reed Gold Mine State Historic Site in 1977. Admission is free, with fees for the guided tours through about 400 feet of restored tunnel and for gold panning, and a museum shows gold and old mining machinery.