Gold Mining at Coker Creek

Gold Mining at Coker Creek. The Tennessee Overhill Experience: From Furs to Factories. For more than a century, Coker Creek was the economic center of Tennessee’s eastern gold district. Prospectors began working the area as early as 1827 when it was still within the Cherokee Nation. Tennessee’s first state geologist, Gerard Troost, visited Coker Creek in 1831, where he found hundreds of miners engaged in “washing of the materials or rivulets, gulleys and other low places.” Over the decades, prospectors, local farmers, and several mining companies used panning, hydraulic hoses, mechanical dredges, blasting and/or tunneling in their search for gold around Coker Creek. A few individuals made fortunes, but most realized only a modest return., [Caption]: , Local gold mining peaked from 1856 to 1860, when 600 to 700 prospectors, including several slaves and freedmen, worked the streams and uplands in the Coker Creek vicinity. Official U.S. Mint tallies document no more than $269, 422 in gold was retrieved between 1831 and 1921. However, early merchants, who traded goods for gold, estimated the recovery at approximately $2,000,000 by the 1890’s., Mechanical dredging at Coker Creek from Ashley, The Gold Field of Coker Creek, 1911.