Tallapoosa gold mine map. George I. Adams, “Geological Survey of Alabama,” Bulletin 40, Fig. 3, 48; courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History Digital Archives.
In 1936, Heflin left Hog Mountain Mining and Milling Company and worked three years for Russell Manufacturing Company in nearby Alexander City. Then, he worked for Alabama Power Company until World War II began. After serving in the US Army for four years, Heflin entered Troy State University as an engineering student. After completing an agricultural engineering degree at Auburn in 1953, he worked for the US Army Corps of Engineers in the Mobile District until he retired.
Llewellyn Green
Llewellyn Green went to work at Hog Mountain in 1931 when Tallapoosa Mining and Milling Company was making preparations to reopen the mine and was involved with different aspects of work. Three of his brothers—Carl, Willie and Wallace—later worked at the mine. His mother, Miss Eula, and his father, Zack Green, took in boarders. With a touch of Old Southwest humor, Llewellyn tells his story of working at Hog Mountain in the 1930s.
Hog Mountain miner Llewellyn Green was “one of the first three men hired at the mine and one of the last three to leave.” Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
In ’20s, my daddy bought an old ’25 T-Model Ford truck for $50.00 and two cords of wood. We moved people and any kind of hauling from cattle to logs. I started driving the truck when I was fifteen years old and was helping on the family farm when I married in 1931. During that winter, Prentice Foshee and Leon Watley were looking after the mining project for Mr. Aldrich. So we three went to work over there—to shovel dirt and rock for samples to send to Mr. P.S. Gardner and Mr. Aldridge “up at New York.” After that more workers were hired, and the project was in full operation in 1932. The operation grew to [be] “bigger and better,” but at the same time, it didn’t pay very much money. I worked there for 10.5 cents an hour, twelve hours for $1.25—for $8.75 for a day’s work. That was seven days a week on a twelve-hour shift. I had to walk three miles to work and three back after this twelve hours of work each day.
I done everything from firing the boiler to cleaning out the shaft and hauling rock and ore on a little ole car. I taken samples to the assay office and helped fix foundations for buildings before we got to mining ore. The mine picked up, and the management got people in Alexander City to take stock in the mine. They used First National Bank, Mr. Russell’s bank, to put the stockholders’ money in. That’s where we got our little pay in an envelope, in cash money, each week. Mr. George Brown was the mine superintendent; George Biggs was the mining boss, and I worked in the mine under him. Then Mr. Session was a survey man, and Mr. Simons was an assay man. I worked under Neil Johnson, the mine foreman when we got the mine started. I worked down in the mine. Simon and Cowley sunk this shaft down from the 100-foot level [to] another 125 feet. The old buildings from old operations had fallen into the shaft, and water was in there, too. Thomas Daughtery and I tried to get out those old timbers that were hung and lodged down in the 100-foot shaft. It was hard, nasty work, but we were proud of our 10.5 cents an hour.
Later, Thomas and I operated the hoisting engine to raise the cage that carried men up and down. We used it to bring up rock, too. Some others who worked there were my brother Willie. We worked together in the assay office and then my brother Carl [and] Thomas Daughtery, Hardy Buckner, Frank Bowen, Tommy Brown was a night watchman there, Morgan Dean, X Dean, Clark Dean, Talmadge and Kermit Jackson, Rhett McWright, James William Steward and William Worthy. Everybody was trained and knew how to do their job. Everybody was very lucky to have done all the work we did and not have some serious accidents in the mine. Among all the people who worked there and could take samples, I could have taken some, but if I had, I didn’t have a way to get rid of it without a record of where it came from. I could have been a wealthy man because I knew more about where the free gold was in all this washing and traveling of the sand, water and ore in what we called the “tailings.”
I worked on until I was among the last three [who] left there in ’38. The mines had to shut down due to the fact that it cost so much to mine this ore and separate the gold from the granite. The stockholders began to think they were going to lose what they had in it, and all of them began to pull out. They told everybody working there, “If you’ve got another chance to work, you’d better take it because the mine is gonna be shut down.”
Then you had to eat what you could get and that was it. We sold chickens for ten cents a piece that weighted a pound and a half. Sold cotton five cents a pound. Worked all day for one gallon of sorghum syrup. Could get three gallons for a dollar if I had the dollar, but I didn’t, so I worked from daylight to dark for one gallon of sorghum syrup. Furnished my own lard bucket to put it in. Worked for a bushel of corn for forty cents a day as hard as I could to help gather a man’s crop—spare time work between the mine and farm work. When the mine opened up, it was a boon for Tallapoosa County at that time. People got employment and made more money there than they could on the farm.
John Johnson and his son Ray operate an old-fashioned syrup mill on John and Judy Kendrick’s property in 1983. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
At the present time, it’s doubtful that the mine could be opened and worked for a profit. There’s lots of gold there, but per ton, it’s not all that valuable. Some of it is good value. Anyhow in this north tunnel, I drilled into a vein eleven feet wide, and my boss man told me [to] “go ahead and drill a heading in the foot wall and cover this thing up.” So me being young and interested in things, I asked him, “Why should I cover this up?” He said, “Well, in a day to come, at the present time of wages going up, this mine might not run too long and later on, we might operate this mine ourselves.” Well, after things got to be a little more expensive, the stockholders didn’t get quite as much money out of the gold for their stockholder, and they began to pull out. That’s how come the mine shut down. But if wages get back down again where people won’t want a fortune to work, it will run again. There’s lots of gold there.
Llewellyn married in 1931, when he first went to work for the Hog Mountain Mining and Milling Company. His wife, Vida, came from a family of miners and contributed information about her family’s involvement in the Hog Mountain Mining and Milling operation in the 1930s.
Vida Mae Bonner Green
My daddy, Bennie H. Bonner, worked at the mine, carpentering, but he didn’t work all the time. Clarence Butler, my first husband, was the night watchman. My two brothers, John and Hershel Bonner, worked at Hog Mountain, too. Hershel, the youngest, was working over there when the mine shut down. He went with Mr. Brown to North Carolina to work there. My daddy and my husband helped to build a large slab house that Mr. Brown lived in during the operation of the mine. Anybody would think of slabs as something to throw away, but the way they fixed it was real beautiful. They had a bunkhouse and a mess hall where the men stayed [who] lived too far way to go back and forth to their work. They had a cook, Mr. Frank Rowan, and he lived close to the mine in a house on Chicken Row. The houses were from the earlier operation that ended in 1916. There were houses on both sides of the mountain that people lived in. A lot of people lived there. People didn’t make much money, but the men stayed in the bunkhouse and ate in the mess hall. They taken so much a week board on ’em while they stayed there. I believe it was a dollar and a half a week.
Some miners brought food; others ate in the mess hall. There were rolling stores that came by once or twice a week. Marvin Allen and Hester Eason toured the community and went by the mine. They had canned goods out of the stores: dried peas, butterbeans, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, cabbage and vegetables in season. Mr. Allen brought vegetables in jars that his wife canned.
Thomas Brown
In addition to his own mining experiences in the 1930s, Thomas Brown had several family members who worked at Hog Mountain mine. An older brother, Doc, worked at the Hillabee gold mine operation and shared stories with Thomas about the Hillabee g
old mine operation. His ancestors lived near Hog Mountain all the way back to pioneer days.
My father was William Alexander Brown. His father came from Spartanburg, South Carolina. He ran a blacksmith shop and a ferry and built a house in 1854 on this land, where I was born and raised. I had five sisters, two brothers and then two half sisters by my father’s second wife. I finished seven grades at Valley Grove School, finished high school at New Site [and] then wound up my education at Massey Business College in Birmingham in 1922.
The mines operated two different times. Now I know when the mines run the first time [pre–World War I]; they built a dam over there on Enitachopco. They made their own electricity, and operated it at the mine. Jim Britton was the fellow [who] stayed there and looked after the power plant, fired the boiler and all. There was a superintendent whose name was Kennedy. He was a smart man, but he went over there and was on the pond in a boat and went over the dam and got killed.
Hog Mountain miner Thomas Brown helped to clear the mining site in 1931 with his team of horses. He operated the hoisting machine. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
The Enitachopco Creek Bridge and dirt road led to Hog Mountain mine. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
I worked there before the mining got underway ’cause I had a team of horses. George Brown, the superintendent, asked me to take my team up there and haul sand to build foundations for the machinery. So I went over there and hauled sand. Three or four other wagons hauled sand: Lander Baker, ole man John Harris, Frank Downs and myself. I didn’t work for about a year after we got through hauling the sand. Then the superintendent of the mill came one night and wanted to know if I would take a job over there running the drier. I went to work then, dried the concentrate after it came out of the flotation machine, and worked until the mines shut down.
I worked at the ball mill, where the ore came from the crushers. It wasn’t anything unusual to pull two hundred tons of rock out of there in eight hours. They had two crushers that ground the rocks down small; then they had one that cut it down very small. The ball mill up on the hill was filled with steel balls, rolling grind ore just like flour. It came out at the ball mill [and went] then into a trough of water and went down to a flotation machine. The water would go out, and this concentrate would float and go into a big tank; then it would come out of the tank into a big ole thing like a boiler except that it was rolling. It was steam that dried the stuff. When it came out on the concrete floor, it was cut into samples and sent to the assay office to see how much gold was running a ton.
I worked as supply man for a while. They had a big board, had nails drove up, and they was numbered. Each of the workers had dog tags with a number. When somebody come in to work in the evening, if he was assigned to the old north tunnel or to the eleventh stope, he’d hang his number up there at that name. Then when a shift ended, if anybody was missing, they could look up on that board and tell where to go to find them. Well, there was over two hundred names up there. We did have to look for them a time or two. I remember one Saturday night, wasn’t anybody working in the mines on Saturday night but the timbermen and the plumbers. Of course, they had these water pipes in there to keep these drills wet. And the plumbers was in there.
When the day shift went off, they’d always shot the holes they had drilled, they’d shoot the ore down. Well after they’d shot these holes, they waited for the smoke to get out before they went in. Ben Buckner went into a place where this damp air was, and it got him. I was listening for the bell for the hoist; and after a while, they give me a signal to pull a man out. I pulled the hoist up, and they brought him out. He didn’t know nothing, knocked him out. I went to the office and got some ammonia. He was panting like a bilious horse trying to breathe. We got that ammonia to him, straightened him out, and he went back in the mine before the day.
But dynamite smoke was the biggest problem they had over there. I used to go down in the mines lots of times in the mornings, when the night shift was getting off, just to hear them shoot. They had those shots timed. Maybe this driller here had fifty holes drilled in the wall, and he’d have fifty loads in there to shoot. This man rigged the shots; he timed those things with his fuses, where they was just like a clock ticking going off. It was interesting. You might be standing a half mile down the tunnel when the shooting started—it’d blow your light out, [the] air coming down that tunnel so.
Dr. Street was the company doctor. I carried several men down there in my Model A that got banged up a bit. The man [who] did the night watching had high blood pressure, and the company doctor stopped him from watching at night ’cause it was dangerous. He was liable to fall in the machinery or something and get killed. Mill superintendent asked me one night if I’d take that job, and I did. I stayed on it until the mine shut down.
I worked over there from ’32 to 1937, when the mine closed. A day or two before I quit, Mr. Brown called me into his office and told me, “The mine is fixing to close down. If you can get you a job somewhere else, go ahead, and all you’ve got to do is just come by and tell me.” Well, I wasn’t thinking about getting a job. I had a farm here, two mules and plenty of work to do. I wasn’t worried about it. But two or three days after that, they all came into work one night, and Brown got out there at the shaft where they’d all gathered to go down in the mines, and he told them all that the mines was closing down. If they could find work somewhere else to go ahead get ’em a job. A geologist, Frank Feyer, from Colorado told Mr. Brown that if they would sink that shaft over there another hundred feet, they would find the richest gold they’d ever found. The superintendent George Brown asked for the money to sink the shaft, but the stockholders didn’t grant it. Mr. Brown left here and went to a mine in Tennessee.
Hugh Price McLeod
I was born near Valley Grove, up around Hog Mountain in 1912. My parents were Mr. and Mrs. C.B. McLeod. They were sharecroppers. My father and father-in-law worked for the Hillabee Gold Mining Company. My wife’s brother, Madison Jones, also worked for Tallapoosa Mining and Milling Company. I worked there five years [and] then went to work for Russell Manufacturing Company in 1936.
My first job was helping to clean out the one-hundred-foot-deep shaft and pump the water out. My job was cleaning out in the tunnels, so they could sink the shaft another one hundred feet. The miners knew where the veins lay in there, and they claimed that most of the time, the deeper you’d go, the richer the veins would get. They also claimed that you can get down under those veins, laying in a forty-five-degree angle. They run northeast and southwest. The miners would go down with their shaft and cut across these veins, and when they’d strike the vein, then they’d follow it in the tunnel, where they would put the track for the cars to run on and haul out ore. When they made a strike, they’d follow the vein, putting down track to run the cars on. Kermit Jackson built the chutes where they pulled the ore down and shoveled it up. They’d push this car up under there and pull it loose. They could just fill that car up in no time flat. Where, if a man was a-shoveling it off the tunnel floor, it would take him a long time to load one of them cars. And when he loaded it, he’d take it down to the elevator and then we drawed it out.
Later, they moved me out from there and put me in the drill shop, heating steel in a clay brick furnace. The furnace could be fueled with kerosene, coal oil or fuel oil. We sharpened the steel that they used in drills. I ran a pipe into the furnace and opened a valve, lit it and connected it with the air pipe. It was awful hot air that blowed out of that pipe. It had to be to heat steel to where they could sharpen it. The drill sharpener was run by air. After the steel was sharpened, we tempered it. After we got through with them, those drills were sharp enough to drill holes in solid rock. Some of the men I worked with in the drill shop at different times were Bill Whiting, Carey White, Llewellyn Green, Hershel Peppers and Thomas Daugherty.
When I first went to work in the drill shop, I worked with Carey White. I recall when Carey lost his finger in an accident down in the mine shaf
t. Carey was the one in charge of keeping the drills in order, and he was responsible for the pump that kept water pumped out of the mine. It was like it was raining down there all the time with water coming out of the rocks. Well the power was off one day. Carey and a helper went down to work on the pump. After Carey packed the pump, he got up to start out and slipped and fell. His little finger went right straddle this rod that the pump run on, and it clipped his little finger off all except a little piece of skin holding it. He turned to his buddy and told him to cut it off. The fellow that was with him got his knife, finished cutting it off and put it in his pocket. There wasn’t any power, so Carey had to climb the two hundred feet up the ladder. His helper told him, “You go first. If you fall, maybe I’ll catch you.” We had a good laugh despite the seriousness of the situation.
We did like to have a bad accident sure enough one night when the hoist man went to sleep on the job. J.P. Mooney…we called him the powder monkey ’cause he was in charge of fixing up all the dynamite to shoot the ore out. Well, it was the third shift, and J.P. Mooney got on the elevator with about three cases of dynamite and a bunch of electrical caps. J.P. signaled Thomas to pull him out. When the elevator got to where J.P. was supposed to get off, Thomas was asleep. The hoisting engine pulled the elevator up to the top of the head frame, where it could go no further. It pulled the elevator over enough so that the wire that was fastened to it broke and stopped the motor. Nobody was hurt, but if that bunch of electrical caps had gone off, the whole place would have been blown to kingdom come.
Alabama Gold Page 9