When I worked in the drill shop, there was just two shifts. But when I worked in the mill, I worked the swing shift, and I worked with different men on each shift. The swing shifts run eight hours. There were three eight-hour shifts, and we would change every two weeks. We would work the first shift two weeks, then the second two weeks and the third two weeks. The mine run two nine-hour shifts. We got paid every two weeks. The most I got was $1.75 a day. The man [who] run the machine for sharpening drills made top pay—$3.00 per day. I walked back and forth every day ’til I got enough money to buy an old ’29 A Model.
A carbide lamp could emit bright light in the mines. The lamp also could be used to ignite fuses dynamite fuses. Courtesy of Tallapoosee County Historical Museum.
Soon after I went to work there, one of the first things they did was clear out a right of way to run the line in there for the machinery. Alabama Power set up special lines to the mine before there was electricity in the surrounding communities. The equipment was brought in a big truck. Before electricity, there was only the carbide light they used in the mine. Those things made a pretty good light down under the ground. See they got a little reflector on them. You light that and put it in a dark place. As dark as it was down underground, it made a good light to work by, enough that people could see how to do their job. They didn’t never have electricity down in the mines. There wasn’t never no power down in there.
Blasting was the last thing they did on a shift. The drillers would go down and set up. They’d drill out what they called a heading, what it takes them, they had to drill several holes, maybe six, seven or eight feet. I believe six-foot steel was the longest we had. They’d start with a short piece of steel and drill that as far as it would go. Then they’d put in a three-foot piece and on like that ’til they go to six feet. It would take from eight to twelve holes in what they called the heading. They would load all those holes with dynamite, and it would take ’em the whole shift to drill that many in solid rock. It was a slow process. What I mean, the drill didn’t go down like it would out in the dirt. Anyway, it would take that long for them to drill out what they called a heading and then load it. They had to pack these sticks of dynamite in the holes, ever how many sticks they thought it would take. At the end of the shift, that’s the last thing they did. They would light those fuses and then go out before they burnt to the cap to blast it off. They would have time to go from wherever they were to out of danger. When the next shift came on, they had to wait thirty or forty minutes to get that smoke blown out. They had fans up there at the top down in the mine to blow that smoke out. If it didn’t, a person couldn’t work in that dynamite smoke.
It [took] six hands all the time around the clock to run the mill, two to a shift. When I worked at the mill, I run the ball mill part, and Ed Walls run the flotation machine. The ball mill was where the ore came out of the bin after it going through the crusher. What I had to do was to take a sample of that stuff at six or eight places every thirty minutes. We had a sample coming in and one going out. I’d get a sample and put it on a piece of paper. Someone else carried it to the assay office, where they could know how the ore was running in mineral value all the time.
The superintendent Mr. Brown came in from Birmingham. They had a stockholders’ meeting. He came on out to the shop, where we were making up some new steel. Steel would come in great, long lengths, and we were cutting it up. He said the stockholders voted to mine up what they had shot down and call it quits. And that’s what they did. They claimed they had mined out when they sunk the shaft the other one hundred feet after they opened up the second time. They had a lot of ore that was shot down in these stokes. There was still a lot they hadn’t loaded out to be mined, and they had got about all that they could from this other level. They had got it all to the first level. They claimed it was going to cost so much to sink the shaft under this ore to get it. They claimed everything was going up with the eight-hour law and wages. They decided it was going to cost more than they could afford to get it out. This was in 1936, but they run on. I believe it was in 1937 when they shut down.
The only other type of work in the community was farming and sawmilling. I think most of the farming was sharecropping. Most of ’em done it on halves, you know—the men [who] owned the farms would furnish everything—mules and tools. A lot of ’em worked on a fourth, when the men [who] was farming owned their own mule and tools. And where it was on halves, the men [who] owned the land furnished everything for the men to work with. Then, at the end of the year at gather time, he would get half of what the farmer made, or fourth, whichever way it was arranged.
Born in 1912 at Valley Grove in the Hog Mountain District, Price left school in the eighth grade to work in the fields with his father. His mother also contributed to the family income. “She’d raise chickens and sell eggs to buy what little things she had to have like sugar and coffee, and other than that, we didn’t have no money…didn’t have nothing, only a lot of love, I reckon.” Taking care of family was foremost in Price’s life whether the money was earned from sharecropping, mining or millwork. In 1937, Price left the mine and went to work for Russell Mills in Alexander City, where he remained for thirty-eight years before retiring.
MARSHAL EDWIN WALLS
Marshall Edwin Walls was a Hog Mountain miner in the 1930s who mixed chemicals for processing ore and operated the flotation machine. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
I started off working on the sand beds at twelve hours a day and night. The hours were from six in the evening to six in the morning. They took the sand bed and built what we call pens, ponds like rice paddies, only smaller, twenty to thirty feet around and built up about knee high. They pumped cyanide solution in the pens. It would run down through to a ditch they had cut. Down at the lower end of the ditch they run it in a vat of zinc to recover the gold out of the cyanide solution. Free gold, or nuggets, we’d run through a sluice box or pan. Most of it was run through a sluice box and recovered on velvet. It settled to the bottom, and the sand and stuff would wash on over. We would take the velvet out, empty it and get the free gold out. That’s the gold that’s not in the compound. The nuggets were big as a pinhead on up; that’s what you recover in a sluice box. The old tailings they couldn’t recover in a sluice box, you pour the cyanide solution in it; then [you] recover it with zinc powder. And it is deadly poisonous. The zinc gathered in the ore like iron fillings going to a magnet. Then when we got so much of it, it would be canned up and mailed to Long Island to a smelter. When they smelt it, the zinc passed off as gas and left the gold. The company developed a new method of separating gold from the compound, mostly in an iron oxide.
To get ore out of the mine, they would tunnel under the vein, shoot it down and haul it out to the elevator. Then they would bring it up in the little tramcars. They dumped it into the ore bin, run it through a jaw crusher and then the gyro-crusher. From there, it went to the ball mill. There was just one jaw crusher. They crushed up the big rocks to one to three inches. Then they went up on a belt and were poured off in another ore bin, and when it was going on that belt, they had boys on each side picking out the granite, just racking it off. It went down into the waste dump. They didn’t have much but ore going into the bin. The ore would go through a gyro-crusher which would crust it up into about a quarter-inch.
The gyro went round and round like a colander. It had an eccentric at the bottom where it went around inside of a bell. The crusher pulverized the ore into an eighth to a quarter inch. Then the ore went up on a belt two hundred and something feet, maybe up to five hundred feet. Then poured off into the bin and from there to the ball mill. The ball mill was a big drum that turned. It was about fifteen feet high and about eight feet wide and turned, and they loaded that with big balls anywhere from one to four inches…and that would crush it up into about three hundred mash, gold dust. That’s about twice as fine as flour.
They went from the ball mill to another machine, like a sluice box. The heavy sand went down und
er, and the fine sand floated to the top, and had returns for the coarse sand to go back into the ball mill and be reground until it got fine enough. Nothing but the two hundred mash that went from there to the flotation machine, where I mixed the chemicals and free agents to catch the gold. They had an oily substance and a powder. You mixed so much with the solution, and it went through. The flotation machine turned about two thousand revolutions a minute. It had augers made out of hard rubber that sucked the stuff up and mixed it all together. Then it floated over the top and ran off down into a trough to the drier. It was dried down there and canned up, all the minerals together to be shipped to the smelter in Long Island, New York. That smelting heat was four or five thousand degrees. When they smelted it, it was twenty-four-karat gold.
There were about two hundred people who worked at Hog Mountain. Inside the mine, there were drillers, muckers and loaders. They loaded the boxcars and brought them down to the elevator and brought ’em out. On the top of the ground at the elevator, there were two top-house boys who carried the cars from the elevator to the top of the ore bin and dumped ore into the bin. There were hoisters, machinists and mechanics at the machine shop. Several men worked there, and then they had a drill shop and a helper on three shifts—carpenters, electricians and general flunkies. They came from all over. Some of them boarded in the bunkhouse. We had a mess hall, a regular crew of helpers. There were thirty or forty [who] boarded at the bunkhouse. Then there were several families that lived in the houses down on Chicken Row, where the road comes out.
These remains from the 1930s Hog Mountain mining operation are the part of the old mill wall. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
There was one huge building, the mill building, where the refining process was. And the crusher house, it was three stories high. It was down the hill, like steps. That was where they crushed it up, and it went from there to the mill on the hill, the ball mill. And the office building and the boss’s dwelling house over the hill. They had a miniature smelter there for the samples, the bunkhouse and the dwelling houses on Chicken Row. They served three meals a day in the mess hall. I carpentered until we got the carpenter work done, electrical work until that was done. Then I put up the conveyor belt by myself. The veins had all been discovered before this last time, and they had worked them out. They went under the veins, shot and hauled them out.
When it got up higher than you could reach, they timbered up; they would get up in there and drill out holes about ten feet deep, and shoot that ore down on them timbers. They had loading chutes. They would open the gates and let the boxcars fill. They would close the gate and take it off, go back and get another. They ran a pretty regular load. The mill ran seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. We would shut down about one day a month to clean up, to get the sediment ore out of the machines. About once a year, we would have to reline the ball mills. After the wage an hour law came in, we got $2.40 for eight hours. Before that we worked for $1.50 for twelve hours.
Henry Wallace Green
I went to work in April 1935 in the assay office, working up samples that came out of ore from the ball mill and get the average of what the value per ton of ore [was]. The process consisted of crushing rocks, pulverizing and heating [them] to get the moisture out. We mixed it with a concentrate and put it in a 1,200-degree furnace and burn[ed] it down. Then we put it in a cupula and taken the lead out of it. We had to put silver with it to catch the gold. Then, we’d take and put the silver and gold in acid to take the silver out, which left the pure gold. It was weighed on a scale that would weigh anything that had any weight to it—probably a hundredth of an ounce.
We crushed the samples in one building and worked them up in another one on account of so much dust and stuff. But the scales had to be on a post that was in the ground that came up in the building. The building couldn’t even touch ’em because any vibration, would knock the scales off. They were that sensitive. It was real interesting.
This picture of a model assay office is used with permission of Pine Mountain Gold Museum, located in Villa Rica, Georgia. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
In the first building was where we had to crush our rocks. We’d crush them like marbles and then dry ’em at a hot plate. Then we’d run that through a pulverizer and grind the rocks into a powder. Then we had to dry it again. Then we’d take a portion of that and put it in a little envelope with a vein number on each one. What I mean is it went by letters like SEA or something like that. But they went by letters. So the ball mill samples and the concentrate went by letters. We didn’t use all that for a sample, but we kept it in case that sample messed up or [if] we had run another one, we had enough stuff to run it. And that’s how they got the average of what there was per ton in the ore. The first of each month they would take what they called face samples. If they hit a new vein they’d check it to see if it was worth drilling. They could get the average by taking a sample of it, the vein, and run it through.
I made fifty-two dollars a month working seven days a week. We didn’t have certain hours in the assay office because there wasn’t but three of us working there, but the hours were set up seven to three. But sometimes we’d get done by twelve o’clock. So when we got done, we were off. Sometimes we had to work ’til four or five that evening. It was set up for seven days. If the mine just run five, we had two days we’d just work a half a day. We’d work seven days a week.
The ball mill run seven days a week unless it run out of ore. But most of the time they had a big ore bend. Held maybe a hundred tons a head. The ore was ground into fine consistency and shipped in cans to a train in Alexander City.
At the time, we were living on Campground Road at Jackson’s Cross Roads, about five miles from the mountain. We walked part of the time and finally got enough money up to buy an ole ’28 Chevrolet from my brother Llewelyn. We went to work in it until the bridge fell in. They got the bridge fixed where you could walk across it, but it was out for a long time. We’d get on what they called a skeeter and go from there on to the mine. We walked when the ground was spewed up and ice all over everything. My brother Carl and I worked together in the assay office, and Llewellyn worked at the mine. He worked different shifts ’cause they run it straight through twenty-four hours where he worked at the flotation machine.
Oplin was my boss man. He was from South Carolina, and he worked with us until we understood what to do in the assay office. When the mine closed, Thomas Daughtery went on to the Carolinas to work at a gold mine there. Carl went to a gold mine between Talladega and Ashland.
The company had to sign an agreement with Alabama Power, agreeing to use their power for five years before they would build a line. The mining company had to furnish so much help to clean the right of way out to put the lineup. The mining company had to put up a deposit before Alabama Power would put up the lines. The lines went just to the mines. There were no offspring lines to houses in the community.
The rolling store would stop at everybody’s house. If you had chicken or eggs, you could swap them for groceries, some merchandise, a few clothes. We didn’t have a lot of money to buy clothes then. I remember Mr. Eason and the others. Mama kept boarders [who] worked at the mine, usually, four at a time. And that’s where she’d buy her food supply—off the rolling store. Rob Bowen kept some boarders. Miss Daisy Simpson kept boarders, too.
8
Life in a Gold Mining Community
Five years after Mr. Johnson discovered gold at Hog Mountain, thousands of men were digging in the hills in northeast Tallapoosa County. Goldville alone had an estimated 3,000 to 3,500 inhabitants. A number of families grew tired of the boisterous environment with saloons and race tracks and left in search of a new site. They found one a few miles south, where they set down stakes and built a town with stores, sawmills and cotton gins. By 1857, the town was officially known as New Site and home to a US Post Office. On the west side of Hog Mountain, a little farther removed from the rowdy camp life around the gold mines, pioneer families
settled on farms and built community institutions of churches, schools and stores. In the Hackneyville area, the first structure was a justice of the peace office with Sam Belle presiding. Barney Kemp was constable. A saloon was built nearby with a Mr. Pennington serving as proprietor. All the buildings were built from hand-hewn logs and roughly put together. Jim Nelson owned the property at the foot of Hog Mountain near Hillabee Creek, where he maintained supplies for the mining camps nearby. He also reserved one room in his home to serve as the community store.
Several churches were built in the communities of Hackneyville, Cowpens, Valley Grove, Goldville and New Site. Near Hog Mountain, families attended the Hillabee Campground Church that took the name Hillabee from the creek around which the Creek Indian culture flourished for hundreds of years. Church services were held under a brush arbor as early as l847, when gold mining activity was widespread in northeast Tallapoosa County. Pioneer families arrived on horseback or in buggies and wagons for camp meetings after crops were harvested, and tomatoes, peas, beans and a medley of other vegetables were canned. Camp meetings were held under the church arbor until the first frame structure was built in 1852. Adults sat on split log benches; and for additional seating, children sat on the straw-covered ground. Candles made from beef tallow lit the gathering of friends and neighbors in the evenings. For the fall camp meetings, temporary bunkhouses were constructed near the natural spring and near the arbor to supply water for cooking and bathing. One building was for the men and boys and a second for the ladies and girls. They sang familiar songs, such as “The Old Rugged Cross,” and listened to several sermons throughout the day and evening. They also found ample time to visit and catch up on community news. When the week was over, the people loaded their belongings into their wagons and surreys and headed home, refreshed. The late summer meetings continued well into the twentieth century until fear of gypsies and horse traders passing through the area frightened residents. Although the fall campground meetings ended, the old campground church still stands today with an active membership. Weathered headstones in the small cemetery date back to the early 1800s. One of the earliest is Wild Bill Hutchinson, who lived with the Hillabee Indians and panned for gold in the Hillabee Creek.
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