The Chinese, most of them from Kwangtung (Gwangdong) Province, represented the largest single ethnic group in the region. Southwestern Oregon mining communities contained people from a number of different ethnic groups. Only late-nineteenth-century hydraulic miners would exceed this destruction. Still, the miners left an altered landscape behind them-hillsides stripped of timber, vegetation hacked away to clear streambanks, and water diverted for mining ditches. As the miners moved on, merchants and farmers became the new leaders in the economy. The initial boom of gold placer mining in southwestern Oregon ended by the late 1860s and, with few exceptions, the mining camps disappeared from the landscape.

Jacksonville emerged as the first true community in the region, with churches, schools, boarding houses, and saloons. The mining camps of Waldo and Ellensburg (Gold Beach) soon developed into service centers, and frame and brick buildings replaced temporary structures. It was so good a prospect that I concluded to stake off our claims.”Īt Althouse, Browntown, and Sterlingville, canvas tents and log dwellings clustered near the diggings.

“After getting down about two or three feet, I washed out a pan of dirt and got a good prospect of coarse gold….We kept bailing out the water and digging down to about three and a half feet.

“I commenced to dig,” Herman Reinhart wrote while working in the Waldo area. Using rockers and sluice boxes to process the gravels, enterprising miners worked long hours. The 1860 federal census counted several hundred miners in various mining precincts.

The miners, primarily men in their twenties and thirties, came from countries that included Belgium, Ireland, Switzerland, Germany, and England, and states such as Massachusetts, New York, Missouri, and Tennessee. Miners also worked placers on the coast near Pistol River and Port Orford and at present-day Gold Beach, where black sand held gold and platinum deposits. Publicity about the find in the San Francisco Alta California brought miners to the region from California and the Willamette Valley, and before long gold-seekers had staked claims on the Applegate, Illinois, and Rogue Rivers. In 18, miners found gold on Josephine Creek, on the Illinois River, and on creeks near Jacksonville, Oregon. In 1848, two years after Lindsay Applegate traveled through the Rogue River Valley, the discovery of gold in Sutter’s Mill, California, brought prospectors through southwest Oregon.

Gold dredging tennessee