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PAGE 2A PICKENS COUNTY PROGRESS THURSDAY. JANUARY 7. 2016
"Thar's gold in them hills" - Yellow Creek's mining legacy
The only remaining building that still stands from the Franklin Gold Mine is the office and com
missary, located on Yellow Creek Road, where it crosses the Etowah River.
Old photos courtesy of Ball Ground Historical Society
In the 1880's, the Franklin-Creighton Gold Mine was modernized after it was purchased by J. M.
Creighton. The Etowah River was dammed in order to power stamp mills that separated the gold from
the ore.
The small mine originally operated by Mary G. Franklin grew
into an enormous mining facility in the latter nineteenth century.
The Franklin-Creighton Mine used some of the most modern tech
niques for extracting ore including a chlorination process which
occured in this mill.
By Larry Lavender
Contributing writer
Although the Cherokees had
been aware of gold in the moun
tains of north Georgia for cen
turies, European-American
settlers first laid claim to discov
ering the gold in 1828. This "dis
covery" led to the first gold rush
in the young United States of
America and also to the removal
of the Cherokees from their an
cestral homelands in what was to
become infamously known as
the "Trail of Tears."
The town of Dahlonega,
whose name is derived from a
Cherokee word meaning "yellow
rock," usually gets most of the
fame for being the center of the
gold rush, but at one time. Ball
Ground rivaled the Lumpkin
County community when it came
to gold mining. In fact, Cherokee
County was second only to
Lumpkin for gold production in
the nineteenth century due in
large part to the Franklin-
Creighton Mine.
Geologically, the same ten-
mile wide vein of gold that
proved to be so lucrative to
prospectors in the Dahlonega
area actually extends southwest-
ward through Cherokee County,
cutting the county in half from its
northeastern to its southwestern
comers. When some prospectors
had no luck with their claims in
Lumpkin County, many of them,
along with scores of first-time
fortune seekers from all points of
the compass, ventured to Chero
kee County.
Many gold mines sprang up
in Cherokee including the Put
nam, Sixes, Kellogg, LaBelle,
and Old Cherokee mines, to
name a few of the more produc
tive ones, but none of these
mines could match the size, pro
duction, and technique of the
Franklin-Creighton Mine located
just to the east of Ball Ground in
the Ophir community.
Only four years after the dis
covery of gold, the state of Geor
gia divided up the Cherokee
lands into forty acre tracts and
offered these lots to citizens by
way of the Gold Lottery of 1832.
Mrs. Mary G. Franklin, a desti
tute widow who lived in south
Georgia and who possessed only
a small farm with one mule, was
surprised when many potential
buyers showed interest in the lot
won by her in the lottery. Like
many others who had been
awarded the tracts, Mrs. Franklin
had little interest in the plot of
land located in a remote northern
area of the state, but when she re
ceived about a dozen offers to
buy the property in a single
week, she decided to see this
tract of land for herself.
After several days journey on
her mule, Mrs. Franklin arrived
at her property to discover
twenty or more prospectors pan
ning for placer gold in the
Etowah River which bisected her
forty acres. She immediately or
dered the claim-jumpers off her
property, hired a man to keep
others away, and returned to
south Georgia to gather up her
family and belongings. Upon re
turning to her property near Ball
Ground a few weeks later, she
and her family began their own
gold-mining venture.
A few months after Mrs.
Franklin began her operation, an
Englishman named John Pascoe,
who had been unsuccessful in his
prospecting attempts near
Dahlonega, arrived in northeast
ern Cherokee County to have an
other go at gold mining. Almost
penniless, Pascoe was granted a
"stake" by Major Wyley Petty, a
well-to-do farmer who lived in
the area. Financed by Petty, Pas
coe leased ten acres and began
operating a small stamp mill,
which was a gold-mining tech
nique that used the water from
the Etowah River to power large
hammers to crash the ore to sep
arate the gold. This time, Pascoe,
who was an experienced miner in
his native England, was success
ful in his attempts and made
enough money to purchase the
leased property as his own. Upon
his death a few years later, he re
portedly left a sizable fortune to
his brothers and sisters.
Meanwhile, Mrs.
Franklin proved to be
a very able business
woman and estab
lished her own stamp
mill. From the pro
ceeds of her opera tion,
she was eventually
able to purchase sev
eral adjoining lots of
land, to build a large
residential mansion, to
buy several slaves to
work in her mines, and
to provide good educa
tions for her children.
Another fortunate Gold Lot
tery winner was Charles J. Mc
Donald, whose property was
adjacent to Mrs. Franklin's land.
McDonald began his own min
ing operation, married one of
Mrs. Franklin's daughters, and
also made himself a fortune. In
terestingly, McDonald also
served as governor of Georgia
from 1839 to 1843
In the following decade, the
Franklin Gold Mine flourished
and expanded and by 1845 was
one of the top producing gold
mines in the south, but the search
for gold fortunes turned west in
January of 1848 when James W.
Marshall found a few flakes of
gold in the sediment of the South
Fork of the American River near
John Sutter's sawmill in Coloma,
California. Many north Georgia
prospectors packed up both their
belongings and hopes and
headed to the west coast.
Although the number of
mines in north Georgia dimin
ished during the following year
as the Forty-niners swarmed Cal
ifornia, many local mines contin
ued their operations well into the
latter decades of the nineteenth
century with only a brief inter
ruption necessitated by the Civil
War. This included the Franklin
Mine which continued to expand
and modernize with only a few
setbacks along the way. One
tragic setback for the Franklin
Mine was a cave-in which pur
portedly killed several of Mrs.
Franklin's slave mine-workers.
Eventually, northern capital
ists became interested in pur
chasing and investing in many of
the local mines. In the early
1880's, a group of Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania investors bought
the Franklin, McDonald, and
Pascoe holdings as well as sev
eral other smaller operations and
combined them into the new
Franklin and McDonald Mining
and Manufacturing Company
that was now expanded to thirty-
two lots of land, a total of 1,280
acres, and the operations were
further modernized with a dam
erected across the Etowah River
to power a planned three-hun
dred stamp mill. The latest scien
tific methods of extracting gold
from the ore were also intro
duced.
The Philadelphia capitalists
hired A. H. Moore, a southern
mining engineer, as the resident
manager and he incorporated
many of the most modem tech
niques of extraction including
the quicksilver or amalgam
process, the cyanide process,
and another method Moore in
vented himself, the chlorination
process. Moore also oversaw
the excavation of a number of
shafts, including one of a depth
of five-hundred feet which was
undoubtedly the deepest mine
shaft in the state and possibly
the entire south.
In a news article in the
Cherokee Advance newspaper
dated October 18, 1881, Mr.
Moore was quoted as boasting
of the new Franklin and Mc
Donald Mine comparing it to
one of the more famous mines
in the west. The mining engi
neer said, "The Ontario Mining
Company of Utah declares a
monthly dividend payable
today...of $75,000.00 - a total of
$3,800,000.00 in six years.
These gentlemen of Pennsylva
nia have a better mine than the
Ontario." For the next couple of
decades, from Mary G.
Franklin's original mine and the
other mines purchased, the new
owners sometimes extracted
gold at a value of as much as
eighty dollars per ton of ore.
Shortly after the combining
of the several mining concerns
into the one larger Franklin and
McDonald Mining Company
was completed, one of the
Philadelphia investors, a
wealthy railroad official by the
name of J. M. Creighton bought
out all of the other owners in
1883. This resulted in the
Franklin Mine, from that point
on, being called the Creighton
Mine. Creighton continued to
retain A. H. Moore as resident
manager until the death of
Creighton in 1887 when Moore
resigned. The Creighton mine
continued operations under sev
eral different managements and
owners until shortly after the
turn of the century.
Coincidentally, during the
same year that Creighton took
over management of the mines,
Ball Ground was incorporated.
It was in the previous year of
1882 when the Marietta and
North Georgia Railroad ex
tended their railway from Can
ton through what was soon to
become the city of Ball Ground.
It was decided to build a depot
there and to lay out town lots
from land that had been donated
to the railroad company by
local landowners. Nearly all of
the lots were sold immediately
and within just two years, the lit
tle crossroads community be
came a bustling town with a
population of over 250, new
business buildings erected, three
churches formed, a high school
started, and municipal officers
elected. The town's rapid growth
could very well be attributed in
part to the success of the
Creighton Mine and the new
means of transporting the ore and
gold from the mine on the new
railroad.
Some of the most productive
years of the Franklin-Creighton
Mine came in the two decades
following the incorporation of
Ball Ground. Although there is
no definitive account of the ac
tual production numbers from
the mine, one report states that
the Franklin-Creighton Mine
produced as much as $1,000.00
a day in 1893. Other estimates
state that the mine easily pro
duced over a million dollars in
gold during the last two decades
of its existence, and that amount,
combined with the gold extracted
in its earlier years could place the
mine's production at near or
above two million dollars total.
The value of gold in that time pe
riod was about $18.00 per ounce
compared to today's price of over
$1,000.00 per ounce. That means
the gold extracted from the
Franklin-Creighton Mine would
have been valued at nearly
$112,000,000 in today's money.
What was it exactly that led to
the demise of the gold mining in
dustry in Ball Ground. Many ex
perts state that there was a
combination of many different
things that led to the end of the
"gold rash." Unscrupulous spec
ulators are cited as one cause as
is local ownership giving way to
owners who resided hundreds
and even thousands of miles
away from their holdings. Be
cause of a lack of trust in the
speculators, investment money
dried up, and remote owners
could not manage their opera
tions efficiently. As far as a more
immediate cause of death for the
Franklin-Creighton Mine, the
Etowah River is said to have bro
ken through one of the mine
shafts resulting in the flooding of
all the shafts. This accident
meant that any further mining
could only be accomplished by
massive and very expensive re
pairs of the entire mining opera
tion. Management abandoned the
flooded shafts instead of making
those repairs.
There are reportedly vast
quantities of low grade ore still
in existence in the vicinity of
Ball Ground, but the cost of ex
tracting the gold from the ore is
prohibitive. However, hundreds
of gold prospecting enthusiasts
and hobbiests continue to roam
the hills of northeast Cherokee
County every year panning for
gold in the local streams, proof
that "Thar is gold in them thar
hills" still to this day.
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