Gold Fever - Before California

"Gold Fever - Before California","  Legends, stories, and histories about it fill book store and library shelves.
  Striking "pay dirt" was a dream come true to the early settlers who risked life and limb to follow that dream.


What is confusing, though,  is why a very similar Gold Rush twenty years earlier has been  so  comparatively  ignored.
 Other stories Claim that Jessie Hogan first found gold in Dehlonega on Ward's Creek.
  Whoever the   credit truly belongs to, mining operations were in full swing in White County, Georgia by 1829 and by 1830 had spread to Lumpkin, Union, and Cherokee Counties as well.
  It is this Rush that led to the "Trail of Tears" when the government drove the Cherokees, who had been panning  gold in Georgia since before the white man settled in the area.


The Gold mining industries boomed in Georgia, with towns springing up here and there almost over night.
 In 1849  word of the California discovery of  gold reached the East coast.
  In the 1880's with the invention of hydraulic mining, the industry began to pick up again and gold is still being  mined in Georgia today.


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