In South Caroline, the gold mines were of two classes, deposit or branch mines, and vein mines, fulfilling the same conditions of some deposits of the North Caroline group. For example, a deposit in the Tomassic Valley covered an area of many acres; and on a branch was extended a mile in length and had a width of 100 yd. at this locality, the auriferous gravel was 8 in to 3 ft thick, and was overlaid by a bed of pebbles 5 to 7 ft thick, the whole occupying a flat between two hills, and being covered by soil, the deposits rested upon mica-slate, having a very irregular surface, and showing some marks of the action of water.
Some gold deposits consisted of beds of rounded and waterworn quartz pebbles, at various sizes, but seldom exceeding 6” in diameter, constituting the most extensive beds in the state and in such positions as to preclude the possibility of the pebbles being rounded and transported by any stream or other aqueous force that could have existed. The gold in these older deposits was rarely if ever be traced to its original source in the veins in place, partly, no doubt from their being transported from a great distance and partly from the total destruction of the veins by denuding forces. In almost every mine of this class, there were peculiar indications known by the miners as favorable or otherwise, the presence of schorl and ferruginous matter. The gold deposits that belonged to this category were located in the Tomassic Valley, on the Tyger, near the summit of the Blue Ridge, at the foot of Poor Mountain, and at Rankin’s on Little River.
Other deposits were characterized by the presence of angular fragments of quartz. Nearly all the vein mines in the state were discovered by tracing these beds to their sources. Not infrequently the veins occurred at a short distance from the deposit; but sometimes, while the soil contained sufficient gold to pay for working, when it was exhausted, not a trace of a vein was seen. This class of gold deposits embraced those being worked in the vicinity of veins such as at Estatoe, in Abbeville; on Lawson’s Fork, in Spartanburg; and in Cherokee Valley. The gold of the deposits mines occurred in irregular particles, more or less water worn, of larger size and greater purity than the vein product. Basically the veins worked were of two types, those in which precious metals were found disseminated in the slates or in beds between them and called by the miners slate mines. The other type includes those in which the lodes are true veins. In the former type, the representative deposits are the mines Chesterfield, Lancaster and some of the Fair Forest mines, in Union. And for the second type, Nott’s mine, Nuckols and Norris’s mine, those near the Limestone Springs and those on the Broad River, near Smith’s Ford.
In the King’s Mountain range, the first mine at the north on King’s Creek was remarkable. The gold was confined to certain ferruginous portions, in which small quartz veins abounded. At other places in this range, the gold was associates with iron as yellow ochre. Above Easter Wood Shoals, some of the mines consisted of talc-micaceous slates intersected by veins of feldspar passing into kaolin, the auriferous veins were coarse crystalline granite. At Littlejohn’s, not far distant, on the contrary, the gold bearing lodes were quartz, and though granite veins were common in the mine, they did not contain gold.