In reality, John Reed’s rock was worth $3,600! After discussing the possibility of finding more gold nuggets on his farm, Reed entered into a partnership with three other men. Frederick Kiser, Reverend Love, and Martin Phifer, Jr., and John Reed began making plans to search the Little Meadow Creek for more gold. Any discoveries they would split equally. The men successfully obtained $1,000 from the Fayetteville jeweler that shorted Reed earlier. With the money, the men obtained equipment to search the creek. During the summer when the creek ran dry and the harvest season was weeks away, the men and their children, a few slaves, and some hired men searched the creek bed for more nuggets.
Reverend Love owned a slave Peter that was assigned to search the creek for gold on a part-time basis. One afternoon, Peter found a 28-pound nugget! Love offered Peter a small part of the nugget if he was able to break it off. But Peter would have to use his fork to break off part of the rock. For a slave, possessions that they owned were treasures, as their owners had no legal or moral responsibility to replace an object once lost or broken. Peter decided to keep his fork intact and passed on the opportunity to break off a piece of the rock. Slaves knew that a man who profited from their forced servitude might not follow through on their promise of a payment initially promised from the nugget. Reverend Love and his partners received an equal portion from the $6,600 received for the nugget; Peter received nothing.
Farms surrounding the Reed homestead became informal gold mining operations. Using everyday tools, men used a technique called placer mining that exposed gold that was just a few inches from the surface. Local newspapers began reporting on the new discoveries of gold and soon, men were arriving at the family-owned farms and unearthing the Carolina Gold Belt. Then in 1825, a local farmer from nearby Montgomery County, Matthias Barringer, discovered that veins in white quartz could contain gold. This discovery changed everything! Theoretically, all a person had to do was follow the veins and find a “lode” of gold.
Wealthy men, including cabinet members from Baltimore and Washington, DC, began investing in gold mining operations. New technologies combined with old technologies and underground gold mining began to professionalize. At first, laborers dug pits in a haphazard way to find the gold. Over time, these pits were dug into shafts that formed tunnels, which became a much more directed way of mining. Working by lantern light, miners used picks, shovels, chisels, crowbars, and gunpowder to pry the ore from the rock. Then miners excavated the shafts and tunnels by loading wheelbarrows and hauling out the rock. Some mines used buckets on rope and pulleys to excavate the ore and rock. Men lined the shafts with timber to hold open the earth as the miners dug deeper underground to mine out ore.