A 17-Pound Rock: The Reed Gold Mine and America’s First Gold Rush

In the spring of 1799, twelve-year-old Conrad Reed was wading in Little Meadow Creek on his family's farm in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, when he saw a glint in the shallow water. He pulled out a rock the color of brass, heavy enough that he probably needed both hands. He carried it home. The family had no idea what it was, and for the next several years it held open a door.

That rock weighed about 17 pounds. It was gold, and the farm it came from became the first place in the United States where gold was mined on a commercial scale.

A farm on Little Meadow Creek

Conrad's father, John Reed, had come to America as a German soldier hired out to fight for the British in the Revolutionary War. He is generally described as a Hessian who deserted, and he settled in the North Carolina backcountry, where he farmed land near what is now Midland. Records of his name vary, and he appears in some accounts under the German spelling Johannes Reith.

The family tradition says Conrad found the rock while fishing on a Sunday, when the rest of the family was at church. Historians treat the exact circumstances with some caution, since the story was recorded later. What is well established is the year, the creek, and the size of the stone.

The doorstop

Nobody in the family recognized the metal. John Reed reportedly took it to a jeweler or silversmith in nearby Concord, who also failed to identify it. For about three years the rock served as a doorstop in the Reed house.

In 1802 Reed carried it to a jeweler in Fayetteville. The jeweler recognized it as gold, and by most accounts offered Reed a small sum, often given as $3.50, for it. The jeweler is said to have valued it at roughly $3,600. Reed later learned the true worth and reportedly returned to demand more, though the details of that settlement differ from one telling to the next.

Mining begins

Reed was not a miner, so in 1803 he formed a partnership with three local men, Frederick Kiser, James Love and Martin Phifer. They began working the creek bed for gold, first by panning and then by digging into the banks. This is the earliest documented gold mining of any scale in the United States.

The work depended on enslaved labor. One enslaved man, named Peter, is traditionally credited with finding a 28-pound nugget at the site in 1803, though that account is harder to verify than the original find. Later, around 1831, miners at Reed began following gold-bearing quartz veins underground, which many historians regard as the first underground gold mining in the country.

A state of gold seekers

News spread slowly, but through the 1820s gold was found in more and more places in the Carolina piedmont. Prospectors and mining companies followed, among them miners from Cornwall in England, who brought experience with hard-rock mining. For roughly the next half century, North Carolina was the nation's leading source of gold. Georgia had its own rush beginning in 1829, and gold also turned up in Virginia and South Carolina.

The gold needed to become money. In 1831, Christopher Bechtler, a German-born metalworker in Rutherford County, began making privately minted gold coins because local miners had no convenient way to turn dust and nuggets into currency. In 1835 Congress authorized federal branch mints in Charlotte, North Carolina, Dahlonega, Georgia, and New Orleans. The Charlotte Mint opened in 1837 and began striking coins the next year.

California and after

The discovery at Sutter's Mill in California in 1848 changed the scale of American gold mining almost overnight, and North Carolina lost its lead. The Charlotte Mint kept coining gold until the state's seizure of it in 1861, early in the Civil War. It never struck coins again, but it continued as an assay office until 1913.

The Reed mine passed through several owners and operated on and off into the twentieth century. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966, and the State of North Carolina opened it as a historic site in 1971. The original 17-pound nugget does not survive: it was melted into a bar soon after its identification, a fate that left no physical record of the rock that started it all.