Participation Type
Paper
Session Title
Session 8.04 Environment
Presentation #1 Title
Back from California: The Late Antebellum Gold Rush and the National Mineral Economy in Appalachia.
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
This paper examines the antebellum Appalachian gold rush as one of the many mountain paths to industrialism. The first southern gold rush, centered after 1829 in the mountains of North Georgia, has received relatively little scholarly attention. The work that does exist makes strong arguments that this early gold fever served as a model (social, technical, and otherwise) for the better known gold rushes of California, Colorado, the Dakotas, and eventually the Klondike that followed. Largely overlooked, a period in the late 1850s highlighted the remaining interconnection of the southern Appalachian mineral economy to distant mining districts and economic centers, even after California took center stage. Engineers with experience in the West and property owners in North Georgia endeavored to apply California techniques of hydraulic mining--costly and elaborate schemes to use high-pressure hoses to wash away huge quantities of soil and expose gold deposits--with the backing of northern capital. These plans, and the work began before the Civil War curtailed efforts, recaptured the frenetic speculative spirit of the early 1830s and drew the southern mountains, at least briefly, more fully into the national mineral economy in ways that presaged the timber and coal booms of the postbellum period.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Drew Swanson is an assistant professor of history at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He is author of A Golden Weed: Tobacco and Environment in the Piedmont South (Yale University Press, 2014) and Remaking Wormsloe Plantation: The Environmental History of a Lowcountry Landscape (University of Georgia Press, 2012), and he is at work on an environmental history of Appalachia.
Back from California: The Late Antebellum Gold Rush and the National Mineral Economy in Appalachia.
This paper examines the antebellum Appalachian gold rush as one of the many mountain paths to industrialism. The first southern gold rush, centered after 1829 in the mountains of North Georgia, has received relatively little scholarly attention. The work that does exist makes strong arguments that this early gold fever served as a model (social, technical, and otherwise) for the better known gold rushes of California, Colorado, the Dakotas, and eventually the Klondike that followed. Largely overlooked, a period in the late 1850s highlighted the remaining interconnection of the southern Appalachian mineral economy to distant mining districts and economic centers, even after California took center stage. Engineers with experience in the West and property owners in North Georgia endeavored to apply California techniques of hydraulic mining--costly and elaborate schemes to use high-pressure hoses to wash away huge quantities of soil and expose gold deposits--with the backing of northern capital. These plans, and the work began before the Civil War curtailed efforts, recaptured the frenetic speculative spirit of the early 1830s and drew the southern mountains, at least briefly, more fully into the national mineral economy in ways that presaged the timber and coal booms of the postbellum period.
