Dahlonega Gold Museum State Historic Site, a brief history of America's first major gold rush and Georgia's oldest existing courthouse..., 2009 December

#1 Public Square Dahlonega, Georgia 30533 706-864-2257
www.GeorgiaStateParks.org
Located on the square, 5 miles west of Georgia Highway 400.
HOURS: Monday-Saturday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. Sunday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. Last film viewing is at 4 p.m. daily
FEES: Small admission fee charged. Group rates are available with advance notice.
RESTROOMS: Located across the street in the Dahlonega Visitor Center
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Head, Sylvia Gaiey and Etheridge
Elizabeth W. The Neighborhood Mint. Dahlonega, GA: Gold Rush Gallery, 2000. Williams, David. The Georgia Gold Rush: Twenty-niners, Cherokees and Gold Fever. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Winter, Douglas. Gold Coins of Dahlonega. Zyrus Press. Reprinted 2000. Yeates, W.S. A Preliminary Report on the Gold Deposits of Georgia. Atlanta, GA: Franklin Printing and Publishing Company, 1896. Reprinted 2000.
Contains 100% recycled content. 12/2009 - 10M/$2598

A brief history of America's first major gold rush and Georgia's oldest existing courthouse . . .

Built in 1836, the Lumpkin County Courthouse building is the oldest surviving courthouse in Georgia. It is now more than 170 years old. The architecture of the two-story structure is Federal with Greek Revival influences, and can be described as transitional. Designed and built by Ephraim Clayton,
it took almost two years to complete. The bricks were hand made from clay dug from nearby Cane Creek and reveal trace amounts of gold. The outer walls are solid, ranging between 24 and 22.5 inches thick.
The second floor of the building served as the county courtroom throughout the years. The downstairs served many purposes and was originally a farmers market where farmers sold produce while court was in session upstairs. In 1840, the

building included an eatery, yet through the years, it was also used as offices for the court clerks, attorneys and others.
In 1965 a new, modern courthouse was built just down the street. Some merchants wanted the old courthouse building destroyed and a parking lot put in its place. Fortunately, another group of citizens called the "Dahlonega Delegation" -- headed by Madeleine Anthony -- traveled to Atlanta to meet with Governor Carl Sanders, whom they convinced to save the building.
In March 1966, Lumpkin County sold the building and property to the state of Georgia for ten dollars. The state then invested about $100,000 to refurbish and stabilize the historic structure. Today, the old courthouse is on the National Historic Register and is home to one of the most visited historic sites in Georgia the Dahlonega Gold Museum.

"There's gold in them thar hills."
Mark Twain
Hydraulic Mining
T he most widely accepted claim to the discovery that started the Georgia gold rush is attributed to Benjamin Parks. According to an interview conducted by The Atlanta Constitution in 1894, Benjamin Parks first discovered gold in the region while deer hunting in 1828. When word of his find got out, Parks said, "It seemed, within a few days, as if the whole world must have heard it; for men came from every state I ever heard of. They came afoot, on horseback and in wagons, acting more like crazy men than anything else." And within a year, thousands of miners had descended on Georgia, creating America's first major gold rush. The miners who flocked to the gold fields were a varied assortment of people. One judge referred to them as "thieves, gamblers and murderers--quarrelsome, drunken and malicious, forming altogether a lawless, ungovernable community."

The Cherokee Indians refused to cede their north Georgia land to the United States. In the compact of 1802, the U.S. Government had agreed to remove all the Native Americans in Georgia in exchange for land. The influx of thousands of people into the Cherokee Nation during the gold rush caused the state government to become impatient, and, on June 1, 1830, Georgia assumed ownership of the Cherokee Nation, calling it Cherokee County.
Cherokee County was divided into ten smaller counties in 1831. The next year, the land was distributed by a statewide lottery at the Georgia capital in Milledgeville. Parts of Hall and Habersham counties had been added to Cherokee County, and from the area where gold was first discovered, Lumpkin County was formed. The Cherokee Indians, still living on the land, were rounded up by federal troops in 1838 and forced to march to Oklahoma on the infamous Trail of Tears.
Auraria, six miles south of Dahlonega, was the first of the gold rush boomtowns. It grew where the first immigrants settled on a ridge between the Chestatee and Etowah rivers. John C. Calhoun (vice president of the United States, U.S. senator from South Carolina and an early mine owner in the area) favored a name for the settlement that implied "gold region" or "golden." Auraria, from the Latin aurum meaning "gold," was proposed by John Powell, a local citizen.

While gold had attracted the first settlers to Auraria, it was not the town's only business. Taverns, banks, doctors and lawyers all prospered as they served the mining community. From the beginning, Auraria had been the provisional county seat, but Dahlonega, a rival site six miles north, was chosen for the permanent county government. The word Dahlonega comes from the Cherokee word "dalanigei," meaning "yellow money" or gold.
The Georgia ores produced a higher percentage of gold than the later California mines. It is not certain how much gold was taken from Georgia because much of it was marketed in non-government mints and assay offices, or used in private commerce. However, from 1828 to 1857, $1.7 million of
Georgia gold reached the Philadelphia Mint.
Congress approved Dahlonega, New Orleans and Charlotte as locations for the nation's first branch mints on March 3, 1835. The Dahlonega Branch Mint opened in 1838, and receipts during its first year of operation amounted to $102,915. Until 1861, its last year of operation, receipts amounted to more than $6 million, including $1,378,710 worth of coins minted. After the outbreak of the Civil War, the mint closed, and in 1871 the building and ten acres of land Water Driven Stamp Mill were donated to the trustees of the newly created North Georgia Agricultural College (now North Georgia College and State University). The mint building burned in 1878. Today, the college's administration

Dahlonega Branch Mint
building, Price Memorial Hall, stands above the foundation of the Dahlonega Branch Mint. On a Saturday in 1849, a crowd gathered in front of the courthouse to hear Matthew F. Stephenson, assayer of the Dahlonega Mint. From the balcony, he pointed to Findley Ridge in front of him and begged miners to stay in Dahlonega, claiming, "There's millions in it." Undeterred by Stephenson's plea, the "Forty-Niners" left for California, yet they carried his words with them. Mark Twain, hearing of the assayer's plea from a friend, wrote in The Gilded Age his famous version of Matthew Stephenson's expression: "There's gold in them thar hills."
Many of Dahlonega's miners went westward after 1849. After returning from California, Auraria minor Green Russell and his two brothers led a gold party to the Kansas Territory where they started the "Pike's Peak or Bust" stampede that gave birth to the state of Colorado. Russell helped found a small village named Auraria after his Georgia home, which is now part of the city of Denver.