Hole In ftlie epound!
Mining for Mystery in the Uwharries
by Kenneth W. Robinson*
Imagine walking through the
woods and finding a mysterious
twenty-foot-wide hole so deep
you cannot see the bottom. You
walk up to the edge of the hole,
peer down, and hear the distant echo
of splashing water, as gravel loosened
by your feet drops more than eighty
feet. Fearful of falling, you carefully
back away. But within a few yards, you
come across an even larger hole —
about one-fourth the size of a football
field and as deep as a three-story
building. The size of this hole takes
your breath away.
This is not Alice in Wonderland's
rabbit hole. You have stumbled upon
the historic Russell Gold Mine in the Uwharrie
Mountains of south-central North Carolina. This
mine began to be worked before the Civ il War.
In the early decades of the 1800s, the south¬
ern Piedmont exploded with activity: Gold! The
call attracted prospectors, investors, and miners.
Tar Heel gold had first been found m 1799 on
John Reed's farm in Cabarrus County, several
miles west of the Uwharrie Mountains. A lot of
gold was recovered from the Reed Gold Mine,
making Reed a wealthy man. Gold fever set in,
as others tried to make their fortunes through
na experienced a gold rush
in the 1820s and 1830s,
becoming the nation's
largest producer of gold
before the great California
gold rush of 1849.
By the 1830s, gold
prospectors and miners
had moved into the
Uwharrie Mountain
region, searching the hills
and panning the streams.
Companies formed to
finance mining opera¬
tions. At least fifteen
mines, including the
Russell Mine, opened in
the Uwharries before the
Civil War. These included
placer mines, where
(ЛЬогс)
Remnants of the Russell Gold Mine include this lateral mining shaft at the bottom
of the open pit (Below, /eft) The bottom of the pit is now grown over with trees and brush.
Archaeologists from Wake Forest University and the Uwharrie National Forest recently
explored and began to document the historic site linages courtesy of Kenneth Robinson.
pressurized water was used to wash gold from
hillsides; shaft mines dug into hillsides; and
large, open pit mines. Later in the century, min¬
ers even used dredges (machines that remove
earth) to search the sands of the Uwharrie River.
The Russell Mine was one of the largest gold
mines in the Uwharries. Located in northern
Montgomery County, it is near a crossroads
aptly named El Dorado for the mythical city of
gold that early Spanish explorers searched for.
One person involved with management of
Russell Mine prior to the Civil War was Charles
F. Fisher, a well-known industrialist and head of
the North Carolina Railroad. After his death in
the war, Fort Fisher on the coast of North
Carolina was named for him.
Russell Mine was an open pit mine. The huge
pit covers about an acre. Its walls reach much
higher than some trees now growing in the bot¬
tom of the mine. Near the bottom of the pit,
large tunnels extend sideways into the walls. A
separate vertical shaft also was excavated near
the open pit.
Workers dug quartz rock containing gold
from the mine and carted it down the hill to a
stamp mill next to a creek. There, crushers
began the process of breaking the rock and get¬
ting gold from the ore. Steam engines powered
the crushers and separators. The ruins of the
brick stamp mill can still be seen today.
Archaeological remains of homes, probably used
by company supervisors, also have been found
’Kenneth IV. Robinson, director of public archaeology at Wake Forest University, has thirty
years of experience in North Carolina archaeology He has excavated amt studied many prehis¬
toric- and historic-era sites but has a special interest in the archaeology of the 1700s and early
1 SOOs, industrial archaeology, and prehistoric cultures of the Woodland period
32
THIN. Fall 200S