After President Roosevelt lifted the embargo on foreign shipments of gold, a 50 percent jump occurred in the value of gold with prices rising from twenty to thirty dollars an ounce. Investors and mine owners began inspecting the old mining sites and evaluating the potential profit. Due to the Hog Mountain Mine’s large production of gold prior to World War I, its reopening seemed “inevitable.”
When news reached the mining communities in northeast Tallapoosa County that the old Hog Mountain gold mine would reopen, residents eagerly anticipated the prospect of regular-paying jobs. The Alexander City Outlook published the announcement by P.S. Gardner, president of the Hog Mountain Mining and Milling Company: “Gold Mine Here to Open by Christmas to employ about 75.”
The Alexander City Outlook from August 3, 1933: “Reopening of Old Hog Mountain Gold Mine.” Courtesy of Tallapoosa County Probate Records, Dadeville, Alabama.
The Hog Mountain Mine will be in operation by Christmas according to announcement made by P.S. Gardner, Jr. son of P.S. Gardner, president of the Hog Mountain Mining and refining Co. The gold mine will employ 75 to 80 men. It is situated 14 and one half miles east of Alexander City and about six miles from Goldville.
Preparations for beginning of mining operations are being carried forward as fast as possible. A power line that will provide for electrical operations of refining machinery and removal of ores from the ground will be constructed by the Alabama Power Company, according to Mr. Gardner.
Approximately 150 tons of ore will be mined when operations first begin. Production [of] up to 600 tons of ore daily will be started after opening of mining operations gets underway in December.
The removal of the precious yellow metal by the Gardner interests will be done under provisions of a ten-year lease Mr. Gardner has taken on the property by T.S. Aldrich of Birmingham.
The Hog Mountain mine was operated for a period of several decades, off and on, but production was stopped in the early days of the World War due to a scarcity of cyanide, a chemical compound made in Germany, used in extracting gold from the ores where it’s found. Before the mine was closed, it had produced in its long history about $600,000 in gold bullion. This production was about three fourths of the total amount of gold taken from mines (Alabama gold mines) in the last hundred years, according to Mr. Gardner.
In its previous years of operation only about 35 tons of ore were removed daily from the veins that were worked. Because the ores therein are low grade, production of a much larger amount of ore is necessary. Therefore installation of electrical mining apparatus is to be provided for. Investigations and soundings of the property in and around the mines have been going on for the last twenty-one months. Without mishaps to intervene, production will get under way by Christmas at the latest, it is expected.
Renewed operation of the mine will be an aid to Alexander City’s business houses. It again demonstrates the wealth and all-around richness of the section of which Alexander City is the trade center and capital.
Businesses in Alexander City had reason to be excited about the reopening of the Hog Mountain gold mine. Any good fortune to come out of the mine’s operation would impact the economic outlook of the city. Visiting speculators, engineers and investors stayed in the old Russell Hotel in Alexander City. There was at least one prominent local investor, Benjamin Russell, who was a director on the company board with O.B. Thurlow, F.C. Weiss and R.M. Fuller, secretary. Mining experts came from other areas: P.S. Gardner, president and general manager, was from Nevada; George M. Brown, vice-president and general superintendent, from Arizona; N.O. Johnson, mill superintendent, from Colorado; and Elmer J. Alderfer Jr., manager of the assay office, from Colorado.
This 1948 map provides an overview of the mining structures, the machine shop, the bunk house, the mess hall, the carpenter shop and the assay office with surrounding tunnels and veins, such as the Old Tunnel Vein and the Champion Vein. Courtesy of US Department of Interior, Geology Survey.
Aubrey Bowen worked as a carpenter restoring old structures at Hog Mountain Mine in the 1930s. His father, Rob Bowen, was the head carpenter. Courtesy of Sue Bowen Smith.
Preparations to reopen the mine began in 1931, when local men were hired to dig drainage ditches around the old sand beds and up the sides of the mountain. Heflin Cleveland, Travice Foster, Frank Smith and Frank Woodruff were in the first group of men to be hired. Charlie Harris, Lander Baker and Thomas Brown used their teams of horses to smooth the sand beds. Thomas Daugherty, Llewellyn Green and a few other local men cleaned out the old north tunnel, pumping water out of the one-hundredfoot shaft. Pipes were installed as conduits for water to run into the ponds, where a cyanide and water solution was applied to extract ore from the old mine tailings. Ore samples were taken from the mine and sent to St. Louis for evaluation. Additional men were hired to dig drainage ditches leading from mine shafts flooded from underground streams. Local carpenters were recruited to repair plant buildings from the pre– World War I operation: the mill, a blacksmith shop, a bunkhouse and a mess hall.
Rob Bowen was the head carpenter. His son Aubrey Bowen, Joseph Cleveland and several other men assisted Rob in repairing not just the mill structures but also the houses on Chicken Row remaining from the pre–World War I operation. Several miners lived in the houses with their families.
After approximately two years of preparations, the mine began full production and shipping gold concentrate in 1933. The operation lasted for around four years, caused by circumstances outside the control of the mine workers. In 1937, the management began to “wind down” the mining project due to the new “wage an hour” legislation signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) banned child labor, raised minimum hourly wages to twenty-five cents and reduced the maximum workweek to forty-four hours. One of Roosevelt’s strongest supporters was Senator Hugo Black from Clay County, Alabama, also a Supreme Court justice (1937–71). Hugo Black was friends with US representative Lafayette Patterson from the Goldville area. Patterson and Black shared “humble beginnings” in rural northeast Tallapoosa and Clay Counties.
The story of Hog Mountain gold mining in the 1930s is told best by the old-timers who worked in and around the mine. Geological surveys, engineering reports and other official data are used to support and expand their stories. After the second period gold mining operation at Hog Mountain closed in 1916, the property remained idle until 1931.
EXPERT OPINIONS
E.H. Emerson, a mining engineer from the East, conducted research and evaluations at the Hog Mountain gold mine for a group of investors who were interested in reopening the mine. The previous operation of the mine by T.H. Aldrich Sr. and T.H. Aldrich Jr. established Hog Mountain as the top-producing gold mine in Alabama, yielding 418.44 ounces of gold.73
Supervising engineer N.O. Johnson observed, “The mill was started in February 1934, and, although production has been relatively small for gold mines working in this grade of ore, as compared to most other gold properties in [the] southeastern United States, production has been large.”
C.F. Park observed Hog Mountain as one thousand feet above sea level and four hundred feet above the surrounding country.
Two rock formations have been distinguished: the Wedowee, of fine-grained dark-gray graphitic schists, and an intrusive quartz diorite of unknown age. The intrusive body, in which are the gold-bearing veins of commercial significance occupies an area about 4,800 ft. long and 800 to 1,300 ft. wide. Park described “the veins of economic importance are confined almost entirely to the quartz diorite. Toward the contact they commonly split into stringers, which pinch out.”
Preparations to reopen the gold mine were under way as early as 1931. Heflin Cleveland, his father and one brother were involved in the initial preparations. Since they lived near the mine, they had explored the old mine shafts and underground tunnels often and were eager to talk with the engineers and investors who came to inspect the mine and conduct ore testing.
Bl
ue Vein. Surrounding veins include Red Vein, Sugar Quartz Vein, Big Pine Vein, Little Pine Vein, Aldrich Vein and Pasley Vein. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
Hog Mountain miner Heflin Cleveland worked at night and went to Hackneyville High School during the day. After graduating from Auburn University, he worked for the US Army Corps of Engineers in Mobile. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
Heflin Cleveland
My brothers and I would go over to the mine into the old tunnels. These little tunnels were scattered all over the mountain. We’d go over there on Sunday lots of times and take pine knots. We would go back into the tunnels and explore them, where the old-timers had dug looking for veins. They were mining for red ore, a soft rock. Most of the red ore had been mined out, and the Tallapoosa Mining and Milling Company was looking for the blue ore that was in the quartz rock. In the last operation, the old mine had a shaft one hundred feet deep that they had drilled, and it was full of water. It had one tunnel, called the north tunnel, [that went] probably about one thousand feet back into the mountain.
At the very beginning, a man, Gardner, out of New York, was instrumental in getting the mine opened. He would get people down here investigating the possibilities. We lived about two miles from Hog Mountain. We would walk over there and listen to the men talking. They were from up north, New Jersey. We were interested in what they had to say. The owner, T.H. Aldridge Jr., was in Birmingham. People wanted to see the mine start back up. It would mean jobs for them. One of the men was Gardner, a mining engineer. There was about a year and a half of just fooling around over there before they started to work the mine.
My brother Byron worked at the mine some, and my dad, Joseph Cleveland, did carpentry work on the houses and buildings. I went to work when they were just exploring the mine, pumping out the old tunnels, drilling and testing the ore to see if it was rich enough to mine. They were working the tailings of the old mine in the sand bed that was dumped below the mine when it was in operation before World War I. They used cyanide for picking up the gold in the “tailings” of the old sand bed. The workers were running water through the sand and collecting the gold that had been left in there, and that was what I was doing when I first went to work with the mining company. I worked with Travis Foster digging ditches with a pick and a shovel around the sand bed for drainage so no water could come in from the mountain. We started at the top and dug a ditch at least two feet wide and from two to three feet deep to catch all the water. I had to be on twelve hours, and Travice had to be on twelve hours. We relieved each other. One of us to be there at all times.
We had to dig ditches down to the solid ground in the sand bed. First, they’d pump lime water to neutralize it and pump cyanide water into these ponds and let it soak through the sand and pick up the gold. Then, they would pump it up the hill into a tank that had zinc shavings in it. The zinc shavings would dissolve and react with the cyanide to pick up the gold and settle it out as a solid. Black mud is what it looked like before it was shipped off. Ed Walls looked after those tanks that had zinc shavings in it in that operation. This was when I first went to work.
After they got the water pumped out of the shaft and got it cleared, they brought in one driller from Birmingham. He drilled and extended the tunnel some, looking for veins. Then, they brought in mining engineers who took samples to determine how much gold there was. Finally, they decided mining was worthwhile, and they sold stock in the mine, mostly to people up North. The main shaft was one hundred feet deep from the 1890 operation. They drilled down one hundred feet and ran two, short tunnels off from it. Then they run this north tunnel up into the mountain. It started at ground level when they first pumped it out and went up. It was not over two or three hundred feet back into the mountain when they got through. When they quit, it was probably a quarter of a mile long or longer. Usually in running those tunnels, they had somebody working all the time on the two-hundredfoot level in the north tunnel. They would trail out and shoot about five feet in a shift. They drilled it, shot it and hauled it out. They would make a five-foot progress in a shift. A shift was ten hours because they were running just one shift a day for about a year. They didn’t open up the two shifts until they got the mill crushing and running the ore.
I went to working down in the mines when they first started what they called “mucking.” The drillers would drill spaces in the tunnels and shoot the rock down. Then the muckers would shovel it up and throw it into cars. The tram cars hauled the rock out, ran it to the shaft and put it on the elevator. They’d pull it up, roll it out and dump it. This was just blue granite rock; it wasn’t ore. They were just looking for the veins to get ore from. I worked in mucking for a while, but I didn’t stay long before I got a job on top. I didn’t like it in the mine; there was always powder smoke from shooting, and it gave me a terrific headache nearly every time I went down there.
This quartz vein was the location of several gold deposits. More gold has been produced at the Hog Mountain District than any other location in Alabama. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
I worked two hundred feet straight down. It was already one hundred feet with two tunnels going off the main. They drilled another hundred feet and ran off tunnels under it. Then when they used blowing charges, they found the veins; they lay slanting up, all the way up in layers between blue granite rocks. We’d start shooting that stuff out, and they might go fifty or sixty feet blasting with dynamite. J.P. Mooney and Roy Mooney were in charge. They learned about blasting from the other people at New Site. Frank and Mon Woodruff operated drills over there. I helped Mon on the drill some, and we’d drilled up—what they called “drilling the face out.” Then we’d take the powder, stamp it in and shoot it. Before we got the holes loaded, we had to move our timbers out so the rocks wouldn’t be shot down on the workers. All the men who worked down in the mine for any time developed silicosis—Thomas Daughtery, (Rufus), Kermit Jackson, Frank and Mon Woodruff, Cecil Osborn. They worked in the mine longer than I did.
I went to work on top in the machine shop, helped in the pipefitting. Carey White was the chief machinist and pipefitter there. Richard White and his daddy were blacksmiths. Carey White helped put in most all of the pipe and pipefitter. I worked with him some in the mine. You had to run pipe for the air compressors to pump air. All the drills run compressed air. You had to run pipes down to keep it running into the head so that as fast as they extended the tunnel, they had to run the pipe on. They put air down into the drill and water. They worked on the same principle as a jackhammer. Only they were better and heavier drills that were fastened on a beam. When they drilled, it made fine dirt, and they used water to blow it out. So you were always wet in there, and that drill made a terrific noise. In fact, I don’t hear good now from working down there with those drills. When you first came out of the mine, you couldn’t hear anything. You couldn’t talk down there ’cause the noise was so bad.
That was continuous the whole time you were down there. The drilling shifts run for nine hours. They’d go in and set the drills up. They had a stand that they would wedge from the top of the shaft to the bottom, and they would screw it into where it was perfectly tight about two or three feet from the face of the tunnel. Then they’d put the drill on it, and they could move it up and down or cross sideways. They drilled about eighteen holes anywhere from six feet deep. They’d start drilling them kind of in a wedge shape so whenever they shot, they’d shoot out a place about three to four feet deep each time.
Then the muckers would come in, shovel and put the rock[s] in cars, roll them out and dump them outside. The man [who] ran the elevator brought it up. The elevator sat to the side. When the man loaded the car, he’d ring the bell and give a signal. They had different rings for different signals. When the car reached the top, the top-house man would roll it off to the dump if it was waste, if it was rock. If it was ore, he’d run it out to the ore bin and dump it in the bin. The crusher was down at the bottom of this ore bin, where ore went into the rock crusher
, where large pieces were crushed into small size rock. It went down on a conveyor belt, and this conveyor belt carried it up the hill to the ball mill that ground it into fine powder. Then it went into these vats where it was mixed with chemicals and agitated like something similar to a cream separator. The ore was heavier; the gold was heavier than the rock just like cream is heavier than milk. Well it felt like black mud. The gold was in a chemical mixture. I believe when the ore was mined out, the richest of it was about thirteen dollars to the ton of rock. I think that was some of the richest ore they had over there—anything from that on down—and when they got through with it at the ball mill, this concentrated stuff that they would send off, they’d send it off to a smelting plant, where they took it and really got the gold out of it. They didn’t do that at Hog Mountain.
When the mine first opened, most of the labor was done by local people. And in the process, some of them learned to do skilled jobs. Other skilled and experienced workers came from other mines. There was a fellar [named] Proctor in Birmingham, Mr. Luther Dye and Mr. Davis. George Brown was the superintendent over the whole thing. He was a graduate of the Denver Mining School. Mr. Biggs was a chemical engineer. And there was a civil engineer, who was the one [who] took care of keeping the tunnels going in the right direction and overseeing that they went where they were supposed to go. He ran a transit and kept those tunnels lined up and leveled. Of course, the drillers had to help keep the tunnels level, too, but he was the one that kept things start.
When I was working over there, I was making $1.25 to $1.75 a day working twelve hours a day. The main shift ran eight hours, but the ball mill ran eight-hour shifts because they had three people to look after them. Buildings included an assay office where they could assay their own samples. They built a big blacksmith shop where they could sharpen their drills. They put up a rock crusher at the ball mill where they crushed rock to a small size like gravel. They carried it up the hill on a conveyor belt, and the ball mill would grind it just as fine as dirt. That’s what it looked like—black dirt. They’d run some kind of chemicals to pick up the gold and float it to the top, where they skimmed it off, like skimming cream off milk. But they’d get some of the fine dirt in the gold. They squeeze it out, put it into bags and send it off. The rest would be dumped. The ball mill didn’t shut down unless they had a breakdown.
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