Hey, this is prospector, Jess,
I’m going to lead you down the road a bit to work on where gold is in different states. So we’re continuing our saga. Last time we covered Gold in California. Today we’re going to talk about gold in Georgia. Where is gold in Georgia? Great State. Interesting finds. Let’s take a look. Here comes Georgia.
Do you see something I see? This pattern running southwest to northeast through Georgia. Atlanta is right here, but you can see right up to the state line here and we have a chunk over in this area as well, but the primary, line of activity, mining activity, goes right through this region. These are all gold bearing mines or finds that were found in the state of Georgia, but you can see the majority of them are here in the, in the northern section of Georgia. We’re running right across north of Atlanta, northwest to northeast, in that diagonal line. It’s important to pay attention to these kinds of things. And let’s zero in on exactly what in the world is going on here.
Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee. And we’re not showing gold in any of these other states, just Georgia in this map. A gold line continues north on up through North Carolina. But for right now, let’s take a look at Georgia because that’s what we’re focusing on. Georgia as a whole has gold, and a fair amount of it historically. It falls mostly in this gold line from due west of Atlanta all the way up through into the North Carolina state line. There is also a chunk over here in South Carolina as well. Virtually nothing to the southern part as it approaches Florida. That’s a lesson for Florida. So let’s take a closer look at the whole picture zooming in.
Notice the relief compared to what we had last time when we talked about California. Notice the very low hilly terrain, not much in the way of terrain that would give us any indication of this amount of gold. And that’s because on the east coast, compared to the west coast, the terrain is undergoing decay of the original orogenic mountain structures that were here. That you can see by these lines that run across the same kind of general direction. These are often metamorphosed slates, shales, and silt-stones from prior mountain ranges that went through here that have since been eroded by things like the hurricanes that just struck. Whenever there’s heavy flooding, there’s a lot of water moving through and it acts like a band-saw and cut things down in the mountains eventually becoming like the east coast where it’s low and hilly. Lots of hills, lots of valleys and canyons, but nothing very tall.
And that’s true here. Where at one time there were tall mountains. What’s happened is as it eroded back, it exposed these gold bearing ores for you to find out. Now some of these ores dive on back into these slopes. These are actually sloping diving planes into the earth. So the dip in the strike form, the angles that these planes that were inclined by basically uplifting, inclined into the earth. This forms the plane that things that were deposited on and has gold trapped in it, very important because most everything, sedimentary, even igneous flows will be deposited on the surface of the earth in a horizontal direction generally when it first is deposited, then as uplifting takes place it rocks and tilts these things back and then they get broken up and flooded. Floods, cut them, and before you know it, these dipping and diving things are all over the place. But in reality they originally were horizontal where the gold would settle out on the bottom of those planes.
Also, a lot of these things had ancient volcanoes running through them and various forms of water or hydro-thermal deposits that would deposit the gold in there as well. Typically you’ll find them along, contacts with calcite, calcium, things like that that are part of that whole hydro-thermal venting process.
But for right now, I just wanted to call your attention to the amount of gold that exists right there in the middle of Georgia. And it’s a kind of an interesting history. Some of these old mines produce gold. This one had platinum group elements. Okay. So it wasn’t just gold. PGE stands for platinum group elements that would be platinum, osmium, iridium, rhodium, etc. All these metals are very valuable in their own right and in some ways more valuable than gold because of their industrial use.
So, Georgia is a great place to go look for gold. And the history here is that this particular area, especially up around the middle. Let’s see if I can find it on the map here. The area around town of Daholonega. Right there in Georgia had one of the earliest gold rushes in the United States in 1829, earlier than the California 1849 gold rush. But it’s an important mining historical fact and by the way, they still have active mines in the area. They have mines you can tour. Let’s see if I can find ones that are active marked on this, to give you an idea.
Right in downtown Daholonega, you know. So there’s a “fish trap” mine. If there’s going to be a mine that’s around here, that’s still active, it’s likely to be for purposes of tourism, more than an active mine that’s really live for commercial development.
The Calhoun mine is still an active surface producer. Commodity is gold. So, placer gold. Again, you see these southwest and northeast tendency for these planes and the mines follow those tendencies because they follow the planes, either where the gold was injected or where it was a laid down, as a prior placer deposit or where it got captured from where it was released from lode gold that was buried in these ancient deposits that have been uplifted. So that’s it for today. Another lesson on gold and where gold is found in Georgia.
Please join us on the page, our Facebook page, “Hunting for Gold.” for more on this topic.
Thanks,
Prospector Jess, – Over and out.
