In October 1852, Charles Ring found gold flakes on the banks of Driving Creek near Coromandel Town. Ring had worked the California goldfields and knew what he was looking at. The government leased land from the local Maori, and prospectors arrived, but the accessible alluvial gold ran out within a month. The field fell quiet for a decade. When it reopened in 1862, the excitement was modest. Coromandel's gold was not the kind you could wash from gravel with a tin pan. It was embedded in hard quartz veins, requiring underground mining and crushing in stamping batteries. This was expensive work, and the returns were erratic. Traces of gold had been noted as early as 1842, but a decade of sporadic finds had taught prospectors that the peninsula would not give up its wealth cheaply.

The breakthrough came in 1867, when Hunt discovered the Shotover quartz lode at Thames. The exact discoverer is still debated: it was usually said to be William Albert Hunt, though it may have been his confusingly named brother Albert William Hunt, who had a chequered reputation after the Hunt's Duffer incident on the West Coast, where he fled a crowd of angry miners at Bruce Bay. Whoever deserves credit, the Thames field was proclaimed on 30 July 1867, and the rush was on. The field produced eighteen thousand pounds worth of gold in its first year and a hundred and fifty thousand in its second. At its peak, Thames swelled to a population of fifteen thousand, rivalling Auckland itself. Steamers plied the fifty miles between Shortland and Auckland, eleven thousand miners' rights were issued, and about two thousand claims employed an average of four men each. But Thames also acquired a reputation for speculative holding of unworked ground, and some miners left for Queensland in frustration.

Most Coromandel mines shared the same problem: rich patches of ore were interspersed with low-grade rock, making consistent profits nearly impossible. The five leading companies of the 1870s, including the Caledonian, Moanataiara, and Kuranui, operated alongside scores of failures. Then in 1889, the Crown Mine at Karangahake became the first mine in the world to use the McArthur-Forrest cyanide process, developed in Scotland. This chemical method dissolved gold from crushed ore and recovered it from the solution, dramatically improving yields from low-grade material and from tailings that earlier methods had discarded as waste. The New Zealand government purchased the patent rights in 1897 and leased them to small companies, recouping the purchase price within ten years. A single innovation had made marginal deposits profitable and extended the productive life of the entire field.

The Waihi Mine had been discovered in 1878 but was not seriously worked until 1887, when English capital funded a cyanide processing plant. Between Waihi and the Thames mines, New Zealand's gold production exceeded half a million ounces in 1902. Output dropped during the First World War, when the Minister of Mines noted proudly that gold miners led the call to arms. Production rebounded in the postwar years, with Waihi's annual output holding steady at around 320,000 pounds. But it was the Depression that brought the strangest boom: in 1935, gold output peaked as unemployed men turned to mining when other work vanished. Two-thirds of production came from the Waihi Company, which that year was split into three entities for tax reasons, including the Martha Company. From 1867 to 1924, the Thames field alone had produced gold valued at over seven million pounds.

Today the Coromandel's mining legacy hides in the bush. The Crown Mine at Karangahake and the Golden Hills Battery at Broken Hills are among the more accessible relics, but disused mineshafts lurk beneath undergrowth across the peninsula, and visitors are warned to keep to marked tracks. Thames retains many historic buildings, including the Golden Crown Battery and the Thames-Hauraki and Saxon Shaft pumphouses. The former Thames School of Mines, which operated from 1886 to 1954, is now a museum. The Martha Mine at Waihi closed in 1952 but reopened in 1987 and continues to operate, while the Golden Cross Mine ran again from 1991 to 1998. The peninsula that the Otago newspaper once dismissed as a hoax turned out to be one of the most persistent goldfields in the Southern Hemisphere, not because its riches came easily, but because the people who worked it kept finding new ways to extract what the rock refused to surrender.