Qualla: Silver Hill Mine https://qualla.com/silver-hill-mine en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:06 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_res/siteimages/rsslogo.png Qualla: Silver Hill Mine https://qualla.com/silver-hill-mine Silver Hill Mine: Introduction https://qualla.com/silver-hill-mine/ On a shallow hilltop in Davidson County, North Carolina, in the spring of 1838, a man named Byerly was prospecting for gold and instead found lead carbonate - and inside that lead, traces of silver. A year later, on January 9, 1839, the Washington Mining Company started work on what became the first silver mine in the United States. The site went on to host one of the most stubbornly recurrent boom-and-abandonment cycles in American mining history: opened and closed six different times, owned by companies based in New York, New Jersey, Cornwall, Prussia, Tennessee, and Canada, and never quite profitable enough to keep running, never quite empty enough to stay closed.

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]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/q/g/silver-hill-mine-wp/dnqg-silver-hill-mine-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Silver Hill Mine: Born of the Carolina Gold Rush https://qualla.com/silver-hill-mine/ 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...

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]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/q/g/silver-hill-mine-wp/dnqg-silver-hill-mine-born-of-the-carolina-gold-rush.mp3 0:06 2 full Silver Hill Mine: The Lodes That Narrowed as They Deepened https://qualla.com/silver-hill-mine/ 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 lea...

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]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/q/g/silver-hill-mine-wp/dnqg-silver-hill-mine-the-lodes-that-narrowed-as-they-deepened.mp3 0:06 3 full Silver Hill Mine: Confederate Lead and Enslaved Labor https://qualla.com/silver-hill-mine/ 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. Immig...

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]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/q/g/silver-hill-mine-wp/dnqg-silver-hill-mine-confederate-lead-and-enslaved-labor.mp3 0:06 4 full Silver Hill Mine: Five More Openings, Five More Closings https://qualla.com/silver-hill-mine/ 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...

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]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/q/g/silver-hill-mine-wp/dnqg-silver-hill-mine-five-more-openings-five-more-closings.mp3 0:06 5 full Silver Hill Mine: What Remains in the Slate Belt https://qualla.com/silver-hill-mine/ 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...

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]]> Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/d/n/q/g/silver-hill-mine-wp/dnqg-silver-hill-mine-what-remains-in-the-slate-belt.mp3 0:06 6 full