The Seventeen-Pound Doorstop

In seventeen ninety-nine, a twelve-year-old boy named Conrad Reed was wading in Little Meadow Creek on his family's farm in Cabarrus County, about thirty miles east of where Charlotte now stands. He found a yellow rock. It was heavy, about seventeen pounds, and he had no idea what it was. He brought it home. His father, John Reed, a German-born farmer and former Hessian soldier who had settled in the Carolina Piedmont after the Revolution, could not identify it either.

The rock sat on the farmhouse floor for three years. The family used it as a doorstop.

In eighteen oh two, John Reed took the rock to a Fayetteville jeweler. The jeweler recognized it immediately as a gold nugget, the largest ever found in the United States to that point. He asked Reed what he would take for it. Reed, who had no frame of reference for the value of gold, asked for what he considered a fair wage: three dollars and fifty cents, about a week's labor. The jeweler paid it without hesitation. The nugget's actual market value was approximately three thousand six hundred dollars.

Reed understood the mistake quickly enough. He organized a small mining partnership, and within a year, a man named Peter, whom Reed had enslaved, found a twenty-eight-pound nugget in the same creek. North Carolina became the leading gold-producing state in the country. For nearly fifty years, until eighteen forty-eight, every gold coin minted in the United States came partly from Piedmont Carolina mines.

The California Gold Rush of eighteen forty-eight overshadowed everything that came before it. The Piedmont gold fields largely stopped producing commercially viable ore around the same time. Reed Gold Mine in Midland, North Carolina, is now a state historic site. You can still pan for gold there. The first one costs you just the admission.