Digging for gold

"It was gold, the selection of Charlotte as a railroad junction, and the building of a network of converging highways which made Charlotte great." (Charles Brockman, Hornet's Nest, Charlotte, 1961, p.267.)

"What accounts for Charlotte?" an out-of-town visitor to the library asked me recently. Why did a city arise here at all, I supposed he meant, so I cited the Indian crossroads which presaged the later crossing of wagon roads, railroads, highways, and air routes in the same location. This transaction has stayed with me because I felt the inadequacy of my answer. Considering Charlotte as a crossroads explains why there is any kind of conglomeration here at all, but does not explain why it is such a large urban center. Any number of other Piedmont towns were the peers of Charlotte in the first half of the nineteenth century. In Sorting out the New South City (Chapel Hill, 1998), Thomas Hanchett explains the importance of the railroad, which came to Charlotte in 1852. It gave farmers a reason to take their produce to Charlotte rather than other market towns. But what made Charlotte a good spot for a railroad depot in the first place? The difference was gold.

Before the coming of the railroad, gold-mining and (after 1835) the minting of gold drew people to Charlotte and diversified the local economy, freeing it from entire dependence on cotton. (The next post to this blog will reprint a story of gold in Charlotte's past from the Civil War era.) The gold deposits discovered in the western states later in the nineteenth century would overshadow the Carolinas' gold rush but not before Charlotte had built on the initial prosperity it brought.

Charlotte's gold-mining days still attract researchers. The Depression of the 1930s sparked renewed local interest in mining, but the veins were exhausted by then. The current specter of hard times returning has brought more people into the library to ask about the location of old mines. Others study it for its historical importance rather than to strike it rich themselves. These latter researchers have a new lode of information to consider now thanks to librarian Jane Johnson of the Carolina Room. She recently travelled to the office of the National Archives in Atlanta, Georgia. There she spent the better part of a week photocopying nineteenth-century records pertaining to the Assay Office and the Mint in Charlotte. She's organizing them now, and they will soon be available to researchers.