Gold rushes This is how is started America’s first gold rush started, albeit snail slowly, in the spring of 1799 when Conrad Reed, 12, skipped church one Sunday to go bowfishing with his sisters in Little Meadow Creek on his family’s farm in Mecklenburg County, near Charlotte, N.C, in the Appalachian Mountains. “Conrad saw a yellow substance shining in the water. He went in and picked it up, and found it to be some kind of metal, and carried it home,” George Barnhardt, a Reed relative, recalled in 1848. Farther south in the mountains, gold was discovered in the late 1820s on and near the Cherokee lands of Georgia. According to one story, Benny Parks found the first nugget on his birthday in 1828 while following a deer path near Dahlonega, Ga. In another story, a slave made the fateful find. Whatever the truth, more than 15,000 miners followed during the next two years, and the Cherokee were banished. In 1832, the state of Georgia held a lottery to distribute confiscated Indian lands to free white men and widows. Grant issued to a drawer in the Cherokee Land Lottery of 1832 As more and more gold was mined, the need developed for a way to convert the gold to ingots and coins. Periodic requests for a mint in the gold fields fell on deaf ears, and private enterprise took up the slack. First territorial gold Templeton Reid of Milledgeville, Ga., was the first to strike his own coinage, but his enterprise lasted only a few months. On July 24, 1830, the town’s Georgia Journal reported Reid had set up a private mint that he planned to move to the mines. The newspaper wrote, “He makes with great facility and great neatness, pieces worth ten, five and two and a half dollars. No alloy is mixed with it, and it is so stamped that it cannot be easily imitated.” Reid moved his mint to Gainesville, Ga., and operated it until mid-October, when he closed it in the face of overwhelming opposition. Critics claimed his coins were lightweight and illegal. One said his $10 pieces contained only $9.58 in gold. Others incorrectly maintained the Constitution prohibited private coinage. South Carolina gold About 150 miles northeast of Reid’s aborted mint, jeweler Christopher Bechtler Sr. opened his own private mint in Rutherfordton, N.C., at the request of the local miners and with the public’s support. The town’s newspaper, the North Carolina Spectator reported July 2, 1831, “Mr. B. has undertaken this enterprise at the suggestion of several gentleman (sic) of the highest standing among our miners for the purpose of putting into use the actual resources of this region as a circulating medium in the transaction of business.”