My great-great-grandfather John Patterson and his brother Malcolm Patterson moved to Alabama about 1831. Malcolm settled with his family in the Hatchett Creek area, just north of Goodwater. John Patterson, whose full name was John Graham Patterson settled along Town Creek near Hackneyville with his wife, Mary Love. They had five children. My great-grandfather John Love Patterson inherited the farm and built a gristmill on Town Creek. John Love Patterson was a miller, and he was exempted in the early part of the Civil War. [Of] course, he was getting on up in years. I don’t believe that he ever got any farther away than a big camp at Lochepocka. When the Federal troops came through, they did take him and the other soldiers over to Phenix City, and he did fight in that last battle at Jerrod, such as it was. I don’t think there was much of a fight.
[Great-] Grandpa Love Patterson was five years old when the Union troops came through Alex City, and he was in town that day with some of the black slaves in a wagon picking up supplies for the farm. He told that they got afraid the soldiers would come and take their wagon and mules. So the black fellow drove the wagon and mule as hard as he could to get home and off the road before the soldiers came by.
I just can’t imagine how they must have lived in those days. They must have had a section of land and operated a gristmill and had four or five slaves. They were bound to be fairly well off for somebody to be up here in this pineywoods country. [Of] course the farm was self-sustaining in those days, a big one, and it was a pretty good size—six hundred acres. Cotton was the cash crop. They grew corn to feed the livestock.
My great-grandfather John Love Patterson and a lady named Ellen Fields had a child named Delona Patterson. [Ellen] either died or left with her family and went to Texas, leaving young Delona Patterson with his father, John Love Patterson, to raise.
I can remember when there were no paved roads at all, no paved roads leading out of Alexander City in any direction. If it rained two or three days straight, you couldn’t [sic] hardly get to Dadeville and to go to Birmingham would take all day. And you could either cross the bridge at Childersburg and pay fifty cents toll, or you could go down the river and take a ferry for a quarter…My father used to go take the ferry to save a quarter. That’s how valuable twenty-five cents was then. But up in here was really back in the country those days. I was born here on this place and stayed here ’til I was old enough to go to school. My parents were schoolteachers. I would go and stay with them during the school year and come back here as soon as the school year was over.
Miller’s Ferry is an example of how goods and families were transported across the river when few bridges were built. Courtesy of Tallapoosee County Historical Museum.
LAFAYETTE PATTERSON
Lafayette remembered where the old racetrack and the old hotel were, as well as the general layout of the small town Goldville, once home to thousands of gold miners:
The town was mostly farmed by dirt diggers. The population that once made Goldville one of the largest towns in Alabama dwindled to almost nothing. Hog Mountain, Low McGregor, [Log Pit], Birdson Creek Mines once dotted the red hills around Goldville, with mine tailings piled high outside the entrance of many of those mines. The mines worked night and day by light of crude lamps until news reached central Alabama in 1849 of the California strike.
JUDGE C.J. COLEY
The Horseshoe Bend Covered Bridge was built with wooden pegs and lumber near the Horseshoe Bend battle field and was destroyed in the 1990s. Courtesy of Tallapoosee County Historical Museum.
A native of Alexander City, Judge Coley was involved in preserving Alabama history and served on the Alabama Department of Archives and History board of trustees for forty years and as its chairman in 1996. He was instrumental in creating the Horseshoe Bend National Military Park and wrote several articles for historical journals, such as the Alabama Review and the Alabama Historical Quarterly. Fascinated with the gold mining history of Alabama, he wrote a paper titled “The Climax of Gold Mining in Alabama” and presented the paper to the Alabama Historical Society on May 5, 1967, in Mobile, Alabama. He noted the fluctuations in the gold mining industry and concluded that more money might have been made from the sale of land than from the discovery of gold, observing, “In so many cases men who got bitten by the gold bug would be able somehow to raise considerable money to open and operate a mine, and when the operation proved unprofitable a sign was hung ‘Land for Sale.’” To elevate the price of his property and to entice a prospective buyer, the landowner would shoot gold into the ore by removing the shot out of a shotgun shell and filling it with gold particles, which he then fired into the crevices of rocks, where the gold particles could be seen. Using another method, called salting, the seller scattered gold in areas that could easily be seen by anyone examining the property. Excitement drove the gold mining industry and attracted those who were looking for a quick path to wealth.74
COWBOY OSBORN
Cowboy Osborn worked for the Hillabee Gold Mining Company before it closed in 1916. His personality and his story could have been a page out of Johnson Jones Hooper’s Simon Suggs, Captain of the Tallapoosee Volunteers.
My full name is James Orland Gaines Osborn. There used to be a fellow named Bill Arp writing a story in Home and Farm out of Georgia. He was writing a story about a fellow named Orland Hyde. So when I was born, Papa named me after Orland Hyde. I was born [on] September 27, 1888. … When I was in school, Woodson Galloway and I were big friends. Woodson went to Hog Mountain, working in the mine. He got to writing to me, wanting me to come up there and work with him. Well, I quit school, come to Hog Mountain and went to work for Hillabee Gold Mining Company. We made a dollar and ten cents a day. Nobody couldn’t get that nowhere else. We were just teenage boys. Them boss men let us work together in the mines there, shooting dynamite. We never had no experience or nuthin’. We like to a got killed once. Never forgot that, but they just let us shoot that dynamite. That’d be agin’ the law now. We ’us ’bout sixteen or seventeen.
James Orland Hyde “Cowboy” Osborn was a Hog Mountain miner who worked in the pre–World War I operation as a teenager with his friend Woodson Galloway. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
They’d dig a big cut deep without no top over it [and] then maybe start to tunnel under. That’s the way was; we had to go way under there. Anyhow, we had to follow the vein, you know, if it went straight up, you had to just keep working out. If you weren’t careful, you went out the top of the mountain. And we like to have went out of the top of the mountain. We got under a big, longleaf pine tree. Got to the taproots of it. We was doing our best; we didn’t want them to know it, but we thought we’d keep on and have that pine fall down in the mine. The old boss man came up and saw we worked out the top. He separated us then, put Gallaway with someone else. When they changed me, they put me with an old man named Tucker Cash, seventy-five years old. I never heard no cussing much or nothing. They put me there with him, and he didn’t have no mercy on me with me just being a kid and all. We used old wooden wheelbarrows, and he’d load that thing like I was a big man, you know. He’d just pile it on there, and I just barely could move it.
And so when they’d shoot, the boss man would take his pick and pick overhead to see if there was anything loose to keep it from falling on us. So I was standing out there a little piece from him one day and he kept picking and picking and struck a loose rock. He kept on until that thing came down. It just came down by his legs, scrapped them. He couldn’t walk hardly; he was already so crippled up so much had already fell on him. I never heard so much cussing in all my life. It like to have scared me to death.
I’d shoot; then in a little bit, we’d go back in there and go back to work. That old dynamite smoke like to have killed me. They finally had to carry me home. Felt like it just lifted up my head off me. So I didn’t go back no more. When I got to where I could, I started back to school again.
Well, see we boarded out there. We paid ten dollars a month. It was just like a town. Folks lived a
ll over the place with houses and all, a company store and little bitty houses all around it. They had an old commissary, the highest-priced place I ever saw in my life. We’d come out of the mines at twelve o’clock and sit out there. They had a Negro cook, and she’d bring cabbage and big ole white biscuits and no cornbread. I just learned to eat what she brought us. My main boss was Mr. Hill Watson, and the other was Mr. Smith. Walter Neal Barfield was the old Negro who drove the wagon that hauled the ore. But this last time [Depression era] the mine run, they had big trucks and folks hauled ore in the trucks. Jim Nelson’d drive the gold mine wagon, [as] they called it. He done the hauling from the mine to the Alex City depot, and they shipped it somewhere. And one time, I heard somebody say he had twenty pounds of gold on that wagon. It’d be dangerous now hauling that much gold.
Hog Mountain’s run three times that I know of. Well this last time, I didn’t work. The first time, Papa had a large garden, and he put out a lot of strawberries. That’s where he first started truck farming. When the strawberries got ripe, he got to picking large buckets full of strawberries, and he’d tote ’em clear to Hog Mountain and peddle ’em out. They were glad to get them. That was his start of truck farming.
Cowboy was friends with US legislator Lafayette Patterson, Governor John Patterson, attorney general–elect Albert Patterson and state senator John Harlan, all from around the Goldville and Hog Mountain area. He missed the 100th birthday party celebration Governor Patterson promised him by only a few months. Cowboy’s many friends, his sense of humor and the occasional glass of homemade wine kept him content. When he died, he was a beloved neighbor in the Valley Grove community and as memorable a character as the original Orland Hyde whom Bill Arp wrote about in the late 1800s.
BEN RUSSELL
Ben Russell is the son of Robert C. Russell, owner of Dutch Bend Mines and grandson of Benjamin Russell, known as “Mr. Ben,” founder of Russell Manufacturing Company, and Roberta Bacon McDonald “Miss Rob.”
“Miss Rob” was the first in the Russell family to become interested in gold mining. She influenced my father, Robert Russell, and my grandfather Benjamin Russell to invest in the gold mines out West. I remember hearing my father and McKinley Hoyt talk about Dutch Bend. McKinley managed the mine, hired people to work and checked on Saturdays and Sundays to make sure the water pumps were working. This was a concern because there were multiple levels below the water table, where they had drilled down in the ground, branching off into tunnels. The site still contains the large concrete and rock foundation for large machinery [that] was there long before my time.
I heard stories about Dr. Ulrich, who bought some land in northeast Tallapoosa County he thought would be suitable for growing grapes and making wine. When he and his party dug into the hillside, they discovered gold and began gold mining. Ulrich made gold bars he exchanged for goods. He did not make shipments to a mint, nor did he altogether abandon his dream of building a commercial wine business. He had a grape vineyard and made wine, although any records on this business were lost. Dr. Ulrich was a German immigrant, but local people thought he was Dutch. This is why they called the bend in Hillabee Creek and the mine itself Dutch Bend.
My father had a lab in the basement of our home with bottles of chemicals, including mercury. With the help of his good friends Dr. Walter B. Jones, state geologist, and Charles Dean, a mining expert, he assayed ore samples. He had a small pipe running out of the basement to remove the chemical fumes and cautioned me, “Mercury will kill you.”
After the Dutch Bend mine closed, my father operated a mine nearby, about 300 feet SW, across from the Rocky Creek Baptist church. There was a building with four levels where on each, a different step in processing ore was completed. Approximately six to eight people worked at the mine. McKinley Hoyt managed this mine for my father.
The Dutch Bend property is owned by Russell Lands Inc. The Russell family has never owned any part of Hog Mountain; however, Benjamin Russell was on the board of directors for the Hog Mountain Mining and Milling Company in the 1930s, and gold miners cashed their checks at “Mr. Russell’s bank in town,” later known as First National Bank.
THE MYSTERIOUS CARETAKER
Mrs. Marie Aldrich Cravener was the daughter of Colonel T.H. Aldrich Sr., who, with his son, T.H. Aldrich Jr., operated the Hog Mountain mine from the early 1890s through 1916. Ownership of the mine was transferred into a corporation known as the Hillabee Gold Mining Company and operated under this name from 1905 until 1916. T.H. Aldrich was an engineer who continued to work in the field of mining and sold his share of the mine to his sister, Marie, making her the sole owner. After the Hog Mountain Mining and Milling Company closed in 1937, Marie began to search for a caretaker who would live on the mountain and look after the mine and the timber. For about two years prior to Mr. Neil’s becoming the caretaker of the Hog Mountain property, he would come to Hog Mountain and “look around.” When the Marie asked people of the area about someone who would be interested in taking care of the Hog Mountain property, they recommended Mr. Neil.
The Hog Mountain rock quarry was composed of ore of low grade or no value that was discarded from the mill. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
Before moving to the Hog Mountain area, Mr. Neil owned a jewelry store in Ohio. During the Depression, he lost all of his money in the stock market crash and was completely broke when he became caretaker at Hog Mountain, where he and his wife lived for ten to twelve years after the mine closed. He was in his sixties at the time.
Mr. Neil and his wife arrived in their REO automobile, which soon fell into disrepair. Not having the money to fix the auto, Mr. Neil parked it by the house that he built on the edge of a drop-off near Hillabee Creek. He built a sluiceway from the sand pile to the house and would go up and put water in the sluice to wash the sand down to the house. He would sift through it looking for gold. Gold was cheap then, about thirty-five dollars an ounce. Mrs. Neil was a very petite lady, not weighing over 110 pounds. She loved cats and, at one time, had twenty-three at their home on Hillabee Creek. When the rolling stores went by, she bought PET milk by the case to feed her cats. She wore a scarf tied around her head all the time. After his REO was disabled, Mr. Neil had no means of transportation. The only time he left was when a rolling store came by or a storm damaged timber on Enitachopco. Then he would go over and clean up debris. Neighbors helped, taking timber as payment.
Hillabee Creek was a source of water for the Hog Mountain gold mine and a place for locals to try their hands at panning for gold. Courtesy of Peggy Jackson Walls.
Information about Mr. Neil was provided by Bernie Atchinson Jr. His father, Bernie Atchinson Sr., was sponsored by the Cravener family after leaving an orphanage. After completing two years at a junior college in South Carolina, Bernie came to the Hog Mountain area and stayed with the caretaker, Mr. Neil, and his wife for about a year after the mining operation had closed.
Bernie lived with the Neils for about a year before he went into military service. Mr. Neil wrote to Bernie telling him about his wife’s death. By the time the Craveners received the message and could return to Hog Mountain, she was already buried. After the service, Bernie went to Auburn. He returned to Hog Mountain one day to visit Mr. Neil and found he had closed the house and left. His departure was as mysterious to Bernie as it was to members of the Hog Mountain community.
OTIS YOUNG
Otis Young lived about a mile from Hog Mountain and worked on his farm until he learned the mine was reopening. Like other men in the Hog Mountain communities, he welcomed an opportunity to earn a regular payday. When he applied for a job, he quickly got one.
When I worked there, George Brown was the superintendent; Colley was the foreman; Davis was the boss over the second shift…We did the drilling two hundred feet deep and one-half mile north and one-half mile south. There was one accident, happened to Bonnie Reed. He was pulling muck out of place, and it caved in. He went down in there about one hundred feet. We worked about four hours gett
ing him out, and he lived. He continued to work at the mine, but he didn’t do work as a mucker any more. Jimmy Farrow run the hoisting machine. I helped Walter Brown haul ore from the shaft to the conveyor [and] from there to the ball mill, where they ground it up.
I walked about a mile to the mine until I got a car, a ’31 A-Model Coupe…They had a commissary there with everything, cigarettes and eats. We had a mess hall and cook, and a lot of folks stayed there and ate there all the time. Mostly, I carried my lunch. There were rolling stores that come by the mine—Hester Eason and Cecil Edwards at Eagle Creek. Wiley Bennett run a store in Cowpens.
I was working nine hours a day in the mine when they went to taking out Social Security in ’36. They said the mine was going to close. There weren’t many jobs then.…My daddy-in-law run a sawmill. They sawed logs with crosscut saws back then, one man on each end. Didn’t pay as much as the mine. So I got a job building metal caskets for two years. After that I went to Russell Manufacturing Company and put in for a job, and they called me. People who come there to start the mine were from Tennessee and Birmingham. They were already experienced hands. Then they’d train the workers.
ALTON PADGETT
Alton never worked in the mine but recalled his elder brother Elbert’s stories about working at Hog Mountain mine. Elbert lived with an aunt and walked across the mountain from her house to the mine six days a week. He and Jesse Lovelady worked together separating rock. Miners would dig until they could see tree roots and then stop to keep the tree from falling in on them. When Elbert left the mine, he worked for Russell Mills in the weave shed until he retired.
LYNWOOD CHAMPION
My name is Otis Lynwood Champion. My parents were Otis Champion and Ceiley Osborn Champion. We lived in Tallapoosa County all our lives except for two years when Dad worked in the oil field in Texas. We came back to Tallapoosa County and bought a farm, where I was farming when the mining started up. I was about eighteen when I went to work in the blacksmith shop with my wife Luveria’s father, sharpening drill steel.
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