Gold is where you find it, as the saying goes.

Today the easiest place to find it is here in a jewelry store.

For years man has searched for gold in creeks and streams and in veins in the earth.

Tonight our story is about a place where man has found gold for over 150 years.

This gold mine has had more lives than a cat!

It was opened in 1827, and today the miners have come back to add another chapter to South Carolina history.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ This is Little Lynches Creek, where, in 1827, a man named Benjamin Hale, H-a-l-e, found enough gold to make it worthwhile to search for more.

Benjamin Hale's creek didn't look like this today.

It was just any creek going through the woods.

This area has rocks and ore that was mined here for the last 150 years.

Hale knew there was gold in the creeks of the Carolinas.

Twenty-eight years before, in 1799, the first gold was found in the United States at the farm of John Reed a few miles north of here in Cabarrus County, North Carolina.

John Reed's son Conrad found a 17-pound nugget in a creek!

After that it became worthwhile for all of the farmers of the area to search their lands in the hope of finding gold.

Benjamin Hale did what I'm doing now... began panning for gold.

As you see, this is a very lengthy process, so Hale developed another idea.

Not only did he pan for gold, but he had discovered it in the banks of the creek.

He leased areas 50 feet square to prospectors who were permitted to dig 20 feet down.

Consequently, Hale had income from two sources... from his efforts and from the pockets of other miners.

♪ [acoustic guitar music] ♪ We are at the Beglin Pit, which is one of the oldest ore pits in the area.

When you have a hole this big, you have a lot of great big boulders.

You have to break it up to make smaller ones out of it.

When you do it this way, it's awfully hard and time consuming!

The early miners invented a stamp mill.

A large cylinder would be raised and lowered by means of rods of first wood, th en iron, then steel.

The cylinders would crush the ore, and thereby the process was increased.

In the early years of the Hale Mine, they invested in one of these, which means that Benjamin Hale was very serious about the mining operation on his farm.

In fact, by 1850, the state of South Carolina was producing 6,000 ounces of gold in that year.

Quite possibly, most of it came from here.

By that time, the spelling of the name had changed.

Now it is referred to as the H-a-i-l-e Haile Mine.

During the Civil War, the Haile was closed down.

Miners were exempted from military service, apparently so they could concentrate on mining lead for bullets.

Near the end of the war, the Haile was wrecked by the Union General William Te cumseh Sherman and his troops as they marched north to Greensboro.

After the war the Hale family sold the property to a James Estridge.

He didn't do very much in a mining operation, and finally, in 1880, the property was sold to New York investors.

Again, they were not able to do too much until, in 1887, they brought in the man who was to change the face of the mine.

Over there is one of the few remnants of the work of this man.

It's a flume... a long, wooden trough that once carried water around this pit so that it would not fill up while miners were trying to dig.

The man who built this and made the mine the biggest producer of gold in the East was Dr. Adolph Thies, a German-born mining engineer who had spent a lot of time at gold mines in North Carolina and Georgia.

When he came to the Haile, he was faced with a monumental problem.

There was plenty of gold ore, but the question was how to get it out.

It wasn't as simple as separating gold from a piece of quartz like this.

Instead, here at the Haile, we find that the gold was surrounded by a mineral called pyrite.

Here is a very small section of one, pyrite being composed of iron and sulfur.

So Dr. Thies did a very clever thing.

He decided to remove the gold chemically and developed a system called the Thies Barrel Chlorination Process.

[no dialogue] These woods are the site of a four-story chlorination plant, the final process of the Thies Process.

After the gold ore was crushed, it was then roasted to a certain temperature and finally placed into barrels with sulfuric acid added.

After a certain time the gold that was left was 99% pure and was ready to be melted and poured into bars.

That is the way the gold was handled at the mine.

It's not as romantic as you'd think it would be in the "good old days."

In fact, this entire complex resembled any industrial or manufacturing co mplex of its day, and it would be hard indeed to know exactly what mineral was mined here.

One of the most interesting men here was the gentleman who became superintendent.

After Dr. Adolph Thies retired in 1904, the industry was taken over by his son Ernest.

Ernest became known as Cap'n Thies.

An excellent superintendent and extremely well qualified, he was a graduate of the Colorado School of Mines.

This pile of rubble and these foundations are all that's left of the beautiful mansion Cap'n Thies built for his family on the top of a hill overlooking his mine.

These particular foundations must have replaced some older ones in the 1930s.

The house was extant until after the 1930s, and we know it was electrified.

It's very sad to see the end of what must have been a beautiful home on a very busy road.

There's a lot of travel throughout.

Plaster from the walls-- rather sad, isn't it?

Over here Cap'n Thies had his rose garden.

He was fond of taking petals of roses, crushing them, and making them into a salve he would give the miners to take care of bruises and cuts.

Later he sold it in a local drugstore.

He was not only highly respected, he was loved.

One miner said, "He would give you the shirt off his back... and his pants too!"

Imagine this beautiful mansion in its heyday where Cap'n, although he never married, entertained friends in a most gracious manner.

Imagine the miners working the pits looking up to the top of the hill at what they called "the yellow-painted mansion attended by white-jacketed servants."

This is the site of the old mine village, a double row of houses which went along where this modern road is today.

The main street was called "Newberry."

Here we have an old well, which probably served several houses, beneath these trees which were young when the village was built back in the late 1890s.

Over in that direction was a store which sold spirits, among everything else, and over here near Cap'n Thies' house was a church which preached energetically against demon rum.

Near the store was the post office.

The postmaster was also the paymaster.

On paydays he would hang out a red flag to let the miners know which day it was.

I'm told that, among the trees and grass, one can still see flowers blooming, planted there long ago by the miners' wives.

This must have been like any boomtown.

It had its Saturday night brawls and its poker games and its dice and its shoot-'em-ups.

Along with the respectable and not-so-respectable people who lived comfortably, side by side, in this village, we had a few prostitutes who, in those days, were called "girls of the line."

It seems one particular girl was very proud of a mouthful of gold teeth.

The story goes that one night, she and one of her customers had a disagreement, probably about the price.

The gentleman dragged out a short-barreled .32 pistol called a "lemon squeezer" and shot her in the face!

Fortunately, it hit her teeth.

The girl grabbed the man, spit out a few teeth, and tossed him outside.

She disappeared for a day or two, and when she returned, she had a beautiful, golden smile.

She vowed the gold came from this particular mine!

♪ [acoustic guitar music] ♪ ♪ One of the oldest items left is this old assay book.

It isn't terribly old.

It only dates from the 1930s.

I would love to see one from the 1880s and 1890s, about the time this old timber was actively used in the mine.

The most interesting book belonged to Susie Anders, who kept the boarding house.

The miners would, sign after meals, give their address so she would be able to collect from them.

There was a fellow named Jake Fligger who had a terrific sense of humor.

He would say he was from "Galcutta" or "Honk Konk" and other silly places.

Finally, Susie had to give up her records and just keep it all in her head so that she would be able to collect the appropriate amount from each miner.

♪ Then there's the story of Frank Pearson, a man who nobody took very seriously.

Frank was a weather-forecaster and fortune-teller.

They did listen to his fortune-telling because miners were a rather superstitious lot.

One day Frank declared that, "Soon this Sodom and Gomorrah will sink into a mine shaft, and this den of evil will be gone forever!"

Unfortunately, Frank was right.

Up the hill here was the stamp mill.

It was a huge installation.

Each stamp, the cylinders raised and lowered upon the moving bed of rock.

Each cylinder weighed 750 pounds, and at this time there were 60 of them.

This is a very heavy bit of equipment that we had in those days up against this hillside.

Unfortunately, on a sunny August morning in 1908, the stamp mill blew up.

Three miles from here the people of Kershaw heard a dull boom.

At the mine the source of the noise was easy to see.

The stamp mill building blew apart!

Throughout the mine the ground shook with the aftershock of the explosion.

Workers saw the building's smokestack tossed into the air like a Fourth-of-July rocket!

Burned and cut workers screamed out for rescue.

One of the injured men was Cap'n Ernest Thies.

With a great deal of effort, he was taken away from the wreck of the building, seriously injured.

He was carried to the yellow house, and he died the next day.

It was a terrible thing, and the mining operation never recovered.

[no dialogue] This is all that's left of the stamp mill.

Remember, this covered the entire hillside.

Here was, undoubtedly, the engine with two mammoth boilers and two 14-feet flywheels.

Over there, in that direction, where there's a trench now, were the sixty 750-pound stamps.

The entire installation followed this ridgeline that way.

The noise it made was tremendous!

One old-timer said that the noise was like "10,000 devils stamping the hell out of those rocks."

[stamping machine sounds] By the way, this reconstructed stamp mill at the Reed Mine Museum in North Carolina contains parts from the stamp mill here at the Haile.

They were loaned to the museum by the grandson of Dr. Thies, Frank Thies, Sr., of Charlotte.

The explosion which ripped the Haile's stamp mill apart came when the boilers blew up.

Three other men were seriously injured in the blast along with Cap'n Thies.

One of these, as well as Cap'n Thies, died later.

So 80 years after the beginning, the Haile Mine was no longer operating.

The New York owners did very little to put it back into operation.

Finally, the checks stopped coming to the miners, and the miners just drifted away.

By 1909, the Haile Mine was sold for taxes.

♪ [acoustic guitar music] ♪ The lusty life of the mine village ended, the village that never had a policeman or a jail.

Once the sheriff came by... looking for somebody else.

Some efforts were made to mine pyrite, but nothing very important happened here until about 1934.

These are the foundations of a building erected at that time.

This was a ball mill in which the ore was crushed in a large drum by going around steel balls.

This replaced the old stamp mill.

Gold and other minerals were extracted from the ore here until 1942, when, by federal law, all gold mines in the United States were closed.

Even the old pipes and pistons from the old stamp mill were collected to use in the war effort of World War II.

♪ This is a current incarnation of the Haile Gold Mine.

In 1981 it was leased to the Piedmont Mining Company, Inc.

They are responsible for the modern operation that we have seen today.

Behind me we have the latest technology of the 1980s, and yet I'm sitting on a Chilean mill which was mentioned in the Bible.

This type of mill, for the crushing and grinding of rocks to receive the ore, is one of the oldest forms of mechanical devices of mankind.

Once again, the Haile Gold Mine is alive, and once again, it's the largest gold-producing mine east of the Mississippi.

[heavy machinery rumbling] [heavy machinery rumbling] This is the pit in which most of the mining is done.

They're digging the pit to a depth of 350 feet in search for the gold-bearing ore. As these modern earth-moving machines dig away, they frequently uncover shafts and tunnels of the 1880s.

Sometimes they bring up timbers such as you see behind me on the hill.

These timbers were not used for shoring up the shafts.

The shafts were cut in solid rock.

The timbers were used to bring ore up from the earth.

♪ [acoustic guitar music] ♪ ♪ This is the business end of today's mining operation.

It's called the crushing and agglomerating unit, better known as "The Grizzly."

Here boulders are crushed into small rocks.

A machine mixes them with cement very loosely and damply to hold them together.

Cyanide is added.

Then they are transported by conveyor belt to another part of the mining operation.

The cyanide used here is not toxic, but you certainly wouldn't want to put these rocks in your mouth.

The material is now dumped into 16-foot mounds on top of plastic sheets covered-- what a seamstress would call Pellon.

Then water is sprinkled over it.

This allows the gold to meld with the cyanide and leach to the bottom of the mound.

Leaching is rather like making drip coffee.

The coffee that we drink would be the leaching of the gold and cyanide that occurs after about 20 days.

The liquid is drained off into a series of plastic-lined ponds.

From there it's taken into the plant where the gold is melted and made into the gold bars.

This is quite similar to Dr. Thies' process, but it works a great deal better.

[heavy machinery rumbling] [heavy machinery rumbling] The new generation of miners at the Haile are justifiably proud of their success at this historic mine.

Jack Whisnant is the operations ma nager of the Haile.

We're the largest in the Southeast by virtue of the fact that we're the only operating gold mine in the Southeast.

We're maybe one of two east of the Mississippi River, and we're beginning an ex ploration to define more ore.

Right now we're mining what the old-timers left.

(Mary) Wh en one says "gold," you have a feeling of romance.

It took so many years to look for it.

Why do we se arch for gold?

(Jack) Romance, economics...

I think you have an opportunity to make some money and do some good while you're at it.

(Mary) Is the search for gold more pleasant and inspiring th an any other mineral?

Do you take it fo r granted?

Sort of, yeah.

Actually, I think of pure gold as kind of a ho-hum, pale, washed-out-looking mineral.

Getting the job done is more exciting, really.

It's nice to see a pour at the end of the month.

(Mary) Is the pleasure in the discovery or in producing wh at you have available with the know-how to get it out?

(Jack) Yeah, I think so.

There's a certain pride in extracting a mineral that you can't see, that's barely there to start wit, making something out of nothing, in a way.

(Mary) Go ld being enjoyed by the ladies and having a romance fo r the search for it, is it still possible to discover today what Conrad Reed di scovered in 1799, a 17-pound nugget... is that possible?

I think it likely is.

Yeah, I think it is.

I think it would be very difficult, but who knows?

It might be possible.

[creek gurgling] So now we're back where it all began, when Benjamin Hale discovered a little gold here on Little Lynches Creek back in 1827.

Today the Piedmont Mining Company is adding its own chapter to the story of the Haile Mine, the mine that would not die.

Today the company is producing almost a thousand ounces of gold per month.

The men who are the present-day miners are following in the footsteps of those who went before because, from the former maps and explorations, today's miner knows where to find certain minerals.

Also, by studying the shafts and tunnels of the miners of yesteryear, they are able to avoid dangerous situations.

So the Haile Mine lives on and will so continue, because here is another search for gold.

It is said that in the entire history of mankind, all the gold which has ever been removed from the earth would amount to 100,000 tons.

If all that gold could be melted together, it would form a cube, each side of which would be 19 feet.

Amazing, isn't it?

All the gold which has been removed from the earth is still on earth, somewhere in some form.

Through the ages it's been melted down and reshaped.

It's still here.

It's interesting to think that the ring you wear might have a little gold from ancient Egypt, and it might even have a little gold from the Haile Mine.

Gold, like diamonds, is forever.

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to find me a creek, any creek in South Carolina, and pan for gold.

♪ ♪ Program captioned by: Co mpuScripts Captioning, Inc. 80 3.988.8438 ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪