Concord Cabarrus North Carolina United States
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The first substantiated gold find in America was in 1799 by young Conrad Reed while playing in Little Meadow Creek, located on the Reed farm in southeastern Cabarrus County.
According to research, Conrad's find was a gold chunk approximately the size of a shoe and weighing seventeen pounds.
His father John Reed had taken the nugget into Concord to a silversmith, who had informed Reed that the rock did not have any value.
The elder Reed had returned home with it, holding it for three years until a trip in 1802 to Fayetteville, where he sells the "nugget" to a jeweler for $3.50.
Over time John Reed learns that the jeweler had sold the large nugget for several thousand dollars.
Reed returns to Fayetteville insisting on more just compensation.
This discovery and news of the sale spurs the beginning of gold mining in the area.
According to research, Conrad's find was a gold chunk approximately the size of a shoe and weighing seventeen pounds.
His father John Reed had taken the nugget into Concord to a silversmith, who had informed Reed that the rock did not have any value.
The elder Reed had returned home with it, holding it for three years until a trip in 1802 to Fayetteville, where he sells the "nugget" to a jeweler for $3.50.
Over time John Reed learns that the jeweler had sold the large nugget for several thousand dollars.
Reed returns to Fayetteville insisting on more just compensation.
This discovery and news of the sale spurs the beginning of gold mining in the area.
John Reed, or Johannes Rieth as he is known in records of the Staatsarchiv at Marburg, Germany, is one of thousands of Hessian soldiers brought over by British troops to fight against rebellious colonists in the American Revolution.
Reed had deserted, as had many other Hessians.
He had traveled from Georgia to North Carolina, where he settled in an ethnic German community sometime around 1787 and began farming.
After his son discovered a large gold nugget in a nearby creek in 1799, Reed had first developed placer mining on his property, then underground mining, and has become wealthy from the gold.
His facility has become known as Reed's Gold Mine.
The Reed Gold Mine will be designated a National Historic Landmark, as it is the first gold mine in the country.
Gold will be mined in North Carolina into the early twentieth century.
Today visitors at the site can explore some of the mine's reconstructed tunnels.