Villa Rica jumps Dahlonega's claim

Dahlonega boosters jealously defend their town's reputation and pooh-pooh Villa Rica's latter-day claims.

"I have not seen any paperwork that proves it," said Tammy Ray, co-owner of Crisson Gold Mine, which opened in 1847 outside Dahlonega. "I just don't like people lying about stuff just to get people to visit."

Carl Lewis, historical preservation coordinator for the year-old Pine Mountain Gold Museum, says Villa Rica's gold rush is documented and real.

"We were the first —- that's the truth," he said last week. "We have totally rewritten the history books. Yes, we have."

Although the location of the nation's first gold rush remains in dispute, North Carolina is widely credited with the first documented gold find in the United States.

Tales abound of Georgia's first gold strike, depending on which poorly substantiated source one believes: a Cherokee boy along the Chestatee River in north Georgia (1815); two English peddlers near Augusta (1823); a slave along Duke's Creek in White County (1828).

Dahlonega built its shiny reputation on the words of Benjamin Parks, who says he discovered gold just east of the Chestatee River in 1828 .

"It seemed within a few days as if the whole world must have heard of it, for men came from every state I had ever heard of," Parks told The Atlanta Constitution in 1894. "They came afoot, on horseback and in wagons, acting more like crazy men than anything else."

David Williams, a history professor at Valdosta State University, said Parks' story is bolstered by a 1,500 percent rise in property values between 1828 and 1830 for the land where the gold was supposedly discovered.

"By 1929, the gold rush was really under way," said Williams, who wrote "The Georgia Gold Rush: Twenty-Niners, Cherokees, and Gold Fever." "Whether or not his discovery is the one that started the gold rush is up for conjecture."

Villa Rica cites map

Villa Rica, the self-proclaimed City of Gold, has succumbed to gold fever with a recent vengeance. Signs around town tout "Villa Rica, Georgia's First Gold Rush, 1826." The city celebrates a Gold Rush Festival in September. And the Pine Mountain Gold Museum opened in May 2008.

"Dahlonega's done a good job with its (gold) history, but nobody here really cared about ours until I started digging around back in the early '90s," said Lewis, a city employee who conjured up the notion of spinning Villa Rica's history into gold. "And you won't really find it in no history book. "

Georgia legislators had already gotten wind of west Georgia gold by the time the state created Carroll County in 1825. Keen for revenue, the state ruled that the mineral rights —- including any dug-up gold —- would become state property.

So the estimated 3,000 miners prospecting in west Georgia kept things hush-hush, according to historian Doug Mabry, who substantiated Villa Rica's claim.

Lucian Lamar Knight, an Atlanta lawyer, minister and archivist, wrote in 1917 of a gold discovery near Villa Rica in 1826. Carroll County became "sort of a Klondyke to which argonauts of the period rushed with pick in hand to unearth the fortunes which they here expected to find," according to an account in Williams' book. The professor, though, considers Knight's claim "implausible" because no source for the information was offered.

Mabry researched Carroll County property deeds from 1827 and 1828, which showed "land values shooting up tremendously, 100 times what they should be."

An 1830 map, drawn by Carlton Wellborn, Georgia's surveyor general at the time, gave Mabry "the final piece of my puzzle." The words "Gold Region" are stenciled atop Carroll County —- but no other section of Georgia. Wellborn served from November 1825 to November 1827. (In the early 1800s surveyors usually took a few years to complete maps and get them engraved in New York.)

"We literally changed the history books," said Mabry who spent three years researching the claim for the city of Villa Rica.

Last August the National Register of Historic Places bestowed its imprimatur upon the 29-acre Pine Mountain gold mine property. In its "statement of significance" the register says, "While supporting evidence exists documenting Villa Rica's claim, only a handful of scholars accept the 1826 start date as factual."

Williams remains skeptical, although he hasn't seen the 1830 map.

"Unless somebody digs up some document laying up in an archive or some newspaper account from 1826 or 1827 that specifically identifies Villa Rica or Carroll County, then we're never going to really know for sure," he said.

Gold draws tourists

Dahlonega's gold bonafides are rock solid. Roughly 15,000 miners crawled over nearby hills, hollows, river and streambeds throughout the 19th century. The federal government established a mint in town that produced 1.4 million gold coins worth $6.1 million during a quarter century of operation.

Locals, naturally, are reluctant to cede their No. 1 ranking.

"Anybody can claim whatever they want," Dahlonega Mayor Gary McCullough said. "We're pretty well known as the site of the first gold rush no matter what Villa Rica says. We don't consider them competition whatsoever."

Joel Cordle, director of Dahlonega's downtown development authority, says, "Gold is still probably the centerpiece of our tourism and visitor industry." A recent study puts a $37 million price tag on tourism's impact on the county. About two-thirds of that amount is derived from the town's embrace of its golden past, the mayor estimates.

Folks in Dahlonega and Villa Rica say they're not looking for a fight. Some Dahlonega promotions are decidedly less superlative these days and include phrases like the "first major" or "first significant" gold rush in the nation.

Villa Rica also touts itself as "Georgia's Forgotten Gold Rush" so as not to antagonize Dahlonegans. But that could change.

"I'm not trying to be in competition with them," Lewis said. "But the truth is the truth."