Gold was discovered in the Kings Mountain area sometime after 1834. The Kings Mountain Gold Mine operated intermittently into the early 1900s and then closed. In 1880, prospectors found cassiterite, an ore of tin, in the pegmatites that ran in a twenty-mile-wide, hundred-and-ten-mile-long band of bedrock through the western Carolinas. They called the band the Carolina tin belt, and later the Kings Mountain belt. The belt extended from the South Carolina line near Grover to a few miles east of Lincolnton in North Carolina. Tin was the headline mineral. Lithium, the metal that would matter most to the twenty-first century, was sitting in the same rock the whole time.

The Solvay Process Company opened a flotation plant at Kings Mountain in May 1942 to produce spodumene concentrate from the ore. The mine ran for thirty-three months until February 1945. The plant could handle 300 short tons of ore per day, but the total production over the war years stayed under 15,000 short tons. The lithium chemicals it made went to wartime applications, most notably high-temperature engine greases. When the war ended, the government contracts ended too. The operation shut down. The Foote Mineral Company bought the plant in 1950 and reopened the mine in the fall of 1950. Concentrate production restarted on July 29, 1951.

Mining concerns trade like commodities themselves. Cyprus Amax bought Foote Mineral in 1996, and with it Kings Mountain. In 1998 Cyprus Amax sold both to Chemetall GmbH, a subsidiary of Metallgesellschaft, which was part of the Dynamit Nobel Group. Rockwood Lithium acquired the mine in 2012. In 2015, Rockwood sold it to the Albemarle Corporation. Albemarle is now actively working to reopen the mine for full-scale production. The 2013 reserves estimate stood at 45.6 million tonnes of lithium ore at 0.7 percent lithium grade, yielding 0.32 million tonnes of contained lithium. By 2017, the U.S. Geological Survey put the Kings Mountain pegmatite district resource at 5.9 million metric tons of lithium.

The spodumene-bearing pegmatite dikes occupy a sliver of amphibolite, 2.8 miles long and a quarter-mile wide, oriented northeast-southwest. The amphibolite is fine-grained, dark gray to greenish black, layered with talc-silicate minerals and calcite and threaded with chloritic biotite schist. It is bordered on most sides by Cherryville Granite. On its southeastern side runs the Kings Mountain shear zone, a fault that separates the granite from the Neoproterozoic phyllitic schist of the Blacksburg Formation. That schist carries muscovite, biotite, plagioclase, quartz, and accessory garnet, staurolite, andalusite, tourmaline, and chlorite. The reader does not need to track every mineral name. What matters is that the rock here has been folded, faulted, and recrystallized over hundreds of millions of years, and the resulting concentration of lithium is among the richest known in North America.

Lithium-ion batteries power electric vehicles, grid storage, phones, laptops, drones, and an expanding list of military and medical devices. The United States, having let most of its battery-grade lithium production migrate offshore, has spent the past several years scrambling to rebuild a domestic supply chain. Albemarle's expansion at Kings Mountain is part of that effort. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act sharpened the urgency by tying electric vehicle tax credits to mineral sourcing rules. A working lithium mine in Cleveland County, in 2026, sits at the intersection of Cold War-era discovery, twenty-first century industrial policy, and the rock that has been waiting there for 340 million years. Driving south on Interstate 85, you cross the southern edge of the property without knowing it. The mine sits just north of the highway, an open pit visible from the air, quiet on the surface and very busy underneath the corporate paperwork.