Dahlonega Gold Museum Historic Site

1836

The museum is the oldest county courthouse left in Georgia

The Old Lumpkin County Courthouse was built in 1836 in the center of Dahlonega's town square. It is the oldest surviving county courthouse in the state. Today it holds the gold museum, with gold nuggets, gold coins and gold panning equipment from the gold rush.

1829

The second gold rush in the United States began here in 1829

The Georgia Gold Rush was the second significant gold rush in the United States and the first in Georgia. It started in 1829 in Lumpkin County, near Dahlonega, and spread through the North Georgia mountains. By the early 1840s gold was hard to find, and many miners moved west when gold was found in the Sierra Nevada in 1848, starting the California gold rush.

Boomtown

At the height of the rush the town was said to support 15,000 miners

Boomtowns, including Auraria and Dahlonega, began to appear. By 1830 an estimate put 4,000 miners on Yahoola Creek alone, and more than 300 ounces of gold a day came out of the region. Dahlonega was said to have supported 15,000 miners at the height of the rush.

15,000miners Dahlonega was said to support at the height of the rush

Cherokee land

The gold lay on Cherokee land, and the miners came anyway

Much of the land where the gold was found was under the control of the Cherokee. Mining camps sprang up in several counties anyway, in what the sources call the Great Intrusion. As the prospectors and settlers poured in, tensions with the Cherokee increased.