My dad bought a 75-acre farm near Reed Gold Mine in Cabarrus County, site of the first documented commercial gold found in 1799, way before the California 49ers struck gold out West. The story goes that Conrad Reed, son of a farmer, discovered a glittery, 17-pound rock in Little Meadow Creek that proved a useful doorstop. Three years later a jeweler in Fayetteville recognized the Reed doorstop was actually a hunk of solid gold. 

Conrad’s father, John, eventually developed a bona fide mining operation, encouraged by the discovery of a 28-pound nugget a few years after the doorstop find. Other mines in neighboring counties opened and flourished, including one with a thriving town dubbed Gold Hill.

Gold Hill eventually produced sufficient gold to result in the establishment of the Charlotte Mint. Charlotte city fathers fretted, wishing the Queen City would thrive like Gold Hill seemed to be doing. It is more than a little ironic that Charlotte’s present-day fortunes were built upon cold, hard cash.

Mining in the state continued until the Civil War claimed able-bodied men, and underground mining ceased altogether at Reed Mine in 1912. Most North Carolina mines were shuttered, even after Cornish miners immigrated there seeking their fortunes once tin mining was exhausted in Cornwall.

Another doorstop never surfaced. But the hope never died. There were rumors, always, of small nuggets found in the Rocky River, which threaded through Cabarrus County past our family farm. 

Frequently, my dad would muse that our horses and livestock were probably making their deposits on top of veins of gold.

As kids, we would climb down the weedy banks into the swift river current, risking snapping turtles and water moccasins to pretend we were panning for gold.

We even knew a prospector, Uncle Dan, who lived in a dirt-floored shack on a dirt road, which lacked electricity or running water well into the 1960s. He was a hermit, a raggedy-looking man, and a source of fascination to all the children in our small community.

Uncle Dan spent most of his days panning in the river, hoping to find a nugget. Unbeknownst to our parents, we would knock at his rickety door and visit. I was too young to attend school, and, in that time, we were allowed to play and roam freely with the understanding we were to be home for meals and bath time. If he was home, we would delightedly crowd into his dark shack, with the only light shining through the boards and the open door as the primary illumination.

Uncle Dan, painfully shy and pitifully poor, was gentle and always kind to us. He was our friend. Sometimes he would show us minute bits of gold and we would gawk.

We children wished him luck and hoped he would have a windfall.

Once, as I played outside busily outlining a playhouse in the dirt with sticks, Uncle Dan passed by the chain link fence separating our farm from the neighbors. “Morning,” I called to him. He stopped. 

“Morning, Miss Cindy,” he answered.

This exchange felt very grown-up, having an adult friend. I grinned a toothy grin — the Tooth Fairy had recently visited — showing the gap in my teeth.

His sun-battered face, wrinkled and dry, spread into a smile. Uncle Dan reached into his pocket and offered something. I stepped closer. He pushed a quarter to me through the fence.

I thanked him and pocketed the prize. Now I had two quarters — one from the Tooth Fairy and one from Uncle Dan!

Were there any coins left for him to feed himself? Even we kids noticed the cans in his shack of pork-and-beans and Vienna sausages.

Quarters still remind me of this moment. A man who had nothing to give freely offered something that was most likely needed and precious to him. 

And that act opened something in me that has never closed. OH