The Carolina Gold Rush started in 1799, when a twelve-year-old boy named Conrad Reed found a seventeen-pound chunk of gold in a Cabarrus County creek. The find sparked the first gold rush in American history, and for thirty years the North Carolina gold belt was the only domestic source of gold in the United States. Mining became the state's second-largest industry behind agriculture. The Charlotte Mint opened in 1837 specifically to coin gold from these local mines. By the time Byerly hit lead carbonate on the hill that would be named Silver Hill, prospectors had been combing Davidson County for at least eight years. Roswell A. King, a Connecticut-born prospector who had spent time in London and Ireland before returning to North America in 1829, bought Byerly's property and started sinking the first shaft. The site was called King's Mine, then renamed the Washington Mine after King formed the Washington Mining Company with John W. Thomas. The North Carolina General Assembly chartered the company in early January 1839.

The Silver Hill orebody runs eighteen hundred feet long and up to twenty-three feet thick, divided into two parallel ore beds called the East and West Lodes, separated by about thirty feet of rock. The most lucrative samples assayed at twelve percent silver, sixty-two percent lead, twenty-nine percent copper, and twenty-seven percent zinc - rich numbers, but with a catch. The lodes narrowed as the shafts went deeper. At sixty feet down, a three-hundred-foot stretch of the East Lode was mineable. At one hundred sixty feet down, that mineable stretch had shrunk by half. Below seven hundred feet, the orebody narrowed to just nine feet thick. The deeper levels also contained more sphalerite - a zinc-rich mineral that complicated lead smelting. By 1850, the ore was forty-five percent zinc. The mining had become a metallurgical puzzle the Washington Mining Company could not solve. They tried Scotch hearth furnaces, then three high furnaces around a central chimney, then English reverberatory furnaces, then a German refining furnace that could melt four tons of lead at once. None of it was enough. The company closed the mine in 1852.

After two years of closure, the Zinc and Silver Mining Company of New York bought the site in 1854 and renamed it Silver Hill Mine. By the late 1850s, ownership had passed to Franklin Osgood, a New York businessman who also owned the Bergen Point Zinc Company in New Jersey. Immigrant miners from Cornwall arrived to work the deep shafts. So did at least fourteen enslaved people, leased from their owners by the company - people whose names the records do not preserve but whose labor extracted ore from one of the most difficult metallurgical operations in the American South. When the Civil War began in 1861, Silver Hill became one of only two domestic lead sources inside the Confederacy, the other being the Austinville mines in Virginia. The lead went by railroad to the Lead Works at Petersburg, Virginia, where it was cast into bullets. The silver mostly stayed inside the lead. Confederate bullets fired during the war's last campaigns contained Silver Hill silver. The Austinville mines were destroyed in December 1864, which may have left Silver Hill as the Confederacy's only lead source for the final months of the war.

Ownership returned to Osgood after the war. The mine reached 500 feet deep by 1867 and 650 feet by 1872. Galena concentrate shipped to New York for lead paint. When zinc became commercially viable for the Bergen Point operation, the previously discarded sphalerite became valuable too. Commercial zinc ore was exhausted by 1875. Legal disputes and refinement costs closed the mine again in 1882. The West Prussian Mining Company drained and reopened it from 1898 to 1900. Small operations ran from 1909 to 1911. The Bureau of Mines surveyed the site in the early 1940s for World War II materials, but found nothing worth extracting. The Tennessee Copper Company reopened the mine in 1960, extended the incline shaft to 1,200 feet, pulled out three thousand tons of ore - and walked away when it proved uneconomic. In 1987, the Canadian Niagara Capital Corporation evaluated the site at thirty million dollars in mineral worth and partnered with Silver Hill Mines Inc. of Ohio to lease the property from the Stevenson family. They processed the ore stockpiles the Tennessee Copper Company had left behind. They never started a new mining operation.

The Silver Hill Mine sits on the western edge of the Carolina slate belt, a band of volcanic and volcano-sedimentary rock that stretches from Virginia to Georgia. The rocks date to the Cambrian period, roughly 580 million years old, metamorphosed between 520 and 400 million years ago to the biotite zone of the greenschist facies. Below the surface, hundreds of feet of shafts and tunnels still hold the ore the Tennessee Copper Company decided was not worth digging out. Surveys in the 1980s described considerable viable ore remaining. Nothing has been mined since. The hilltop where Byerly found lead carbonate in 1838 now sits quiet, the early American mining experiment that pioneered domestic silver production reduced to a footnote in a state whose mining history runs deeper than its better-known cotton and tobacco economies.