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13. The Discovery of Gold in Alabama His name was Ulrich, he was German and he bought some good Alabama land for a vineyard. It reminds us oftwo other German settlers, a farmer named John Reed in North Carolina forty years before and ten years later, John Sutter, who planned to raise crops in California. When Dr. Ulrich arrived in 1840 at the port city of Savannah , he mopped his brow from the heat, looked about him at the flat land and swamps and shook his head. He knew he must travel for miles inland to find country that would look like home. Ulrich's plan was to produce commercial wines. His ox drawn wagon rolled slowly through east Alabama while Ulrich stared about him at the steep slopes rising from the banks of the Hillabee River and thought the countryside of Tallapoosa County was ideal for his purpose. Later this strip ofearth fifty miles long rising above the ground around it would be imaginatively named the Devil's Backbone. He purchased 1,200 acres beside a stream for his vineyard and home. After he completed his house only one important thing remained to do-he must secure his plants. Dr. Ulrich made a special trip back to Germany searching the valley of the Rhine for the best varietal grapes to take back to his vineyards. As soon as the vines were set out he turned his attention to providing a cool cellar for the wines he would produce and began to dig an immense tunnel into the hillside. "Ach!" he exclaimed excitedly one day while he was digging out the wall of the cave; for a blow from his pick had opened a glittering vein of gold! 147 148 The Gold Seekers Ulrich was quite familiar with the gold strikes in the Carolinas and Georgia, and unlike Reed and Sutter, he was ready to forget crops and a winery. The grape vines now grew neglected in the fields while Dr. Ulrich spent his days searching the soil of his land and finding good veins of oxidized ore. A man of intellect and broad knowledge, he was fascinated by his research into the technology of mining and took readily to modernizing the process. He laid wooden tracks and built small ore cars with mules to pull them. A nearby stream provided the power for his stamp mill to crush the ore. Rather than make a trip to the mint at Dahlonega with his gold, Ulrich melted it into small, one-ounce bars and traded them for supplies and cattle. Neighbors called his mine the "Dutch Bend Mine" for settlers frequently confused German immigrants with Dutch. Between 1830 and 1840 Alabama mined a large quantity of gold and nuggets were found that were valued as high as $1,200 each. Prospectors burrowed deep into the red clay soil which had once yielded cotton and corn and called their mines frontier names like "Hog Mountain" and "Lost Dutchman." Near "Hog Mountain" was the boomtown of Goldville with its cock fighting pits, race track and 12 barrooms . The town of Eagle Creek ran a close second with its rowdy games and bars for entertainment starved miners. By day men from the camps and shantytowns washed sand and gravel from placer deposits along the streams using pans, cradles, sluices, and other devices. When gold became more difficult to trap, they used quicksilver to extract the particles. Just as on North Carolina's Yadkin River, a Cleburne County company used a dredge to recover 144.17.45] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 03:17 GMT) Discovery of Gold in Alabama 149 gold from the soil the rivers had deposited along Dynne and Chulafinee Creeks. Most gold discoveries were made in the triangular gold belt of northeastern Alabama bordering on Georgia. The belt included Randolph, Cleburne, Clay, Chambers, Coosa, and Tallapoosa counties and parts of Chilton and Elmore counties. Gold towns sprang up along the course of the Coosa or Tallapoosa rivers or were near the small streams that flowed from them. Arbacoochee, Pinetucky, Chulafinnee , and Riddle's Mill were all familiar names to the miners, along with the Idaho district, Cragford, Pinckneyville, Hog Mountain, and the Devil's Backbone. Arbacoochee soon became the largest town in Alabama with more than six hundred miners working in the gold fields. Prospectors surged into the area from Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. There were twenty general stores, five bar rooms, two mining equipment stores, two hotels, a fire...

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