There's Gold In Them Eastern Hills, Too

This nation's western states are known for their gold fields. but...

We'd always dreamed of owning a small place in the country, but-with a family of seven to feed-my wife and I could never quite save enough money to finance our move.

A couple of years ago, however-during an extended vacation in Colorado-we decided to try our hands at gold panning. The children were delighted and pursued the project with great enthusiasm. But after the youngsters found their first specks of aurum, the "game" suddenly became more serious. As it turned out, our finds for that summer were limited by our inexperience and crude methods.

Once we got home, I began to read up on the subject . . . and was surprised to learn about the existence of gold fields on the "Atlantic side" of the country. When my business took me to Vermont for a couple of weeks . .. I decided to check out the stories about eastern gold in my spare time. I did some research, chose the most likely spot, and tried my luck as soon as I arrived. The result was a little over two ounces of almost pure gold!

Last year-encouraged by my success in New England-the family decided we'd try our luck in Arkansas with a homemade sluice. That trip was such a success that we were able to purchase a three-acre farm, build barns, pay for 130 fruit trees, and make a sizable down payment on a trailer house!

We've planned another gold-hunting expedition into the southern gold fields for this year. In fact, I've already bought a special metal detector that's equipped to find small pockets of gold under water. (Our next purchase will be a lightweight aluminum sluice . . . suitable for backpacking.)

How do you go about finding out if gold may be waitin' to be discovered in your locale? First of all, write to your state's bureau of mines and/or geology for information on placer gold. Then go to the largest library near you and request the area's oldest Geological Survey Mineral Reports.

The following is a general "hotspot" listing that I've compiled for states that aren't well-known as gold producers.

ALABAMA: The Cotton State's 1929 Mineral Report tells of an unusual type of gold found in Tallapoosa County. It turned up in graphite deposits, which made the metal look like coal! Gold has been mined in quantity in Chilton, Clay, Cleburne, Elmore, Randolph, Talladega, and Tallapoosa Counties ... and the reporting geologist noted that there was still lots of available gold dust that had been missed by the early miners. Some assay samples were recorded at an unbelievable $500 per ton at $20 an ounce. That figures out to approximately $6,250 per ton at today's high prices!

ARKANSAS: The 1888 assay reports show gold samples taken in Hot Spring, Logan, Montgomery, Pike, Polk, Pulaski, Saline, Scott, and Yell Counties. These samples averaged from $6.02 to $12.00 worth of gold a ton, with the best ore (rated at over $60 a ton) coming from Montgomery County. And silver, too, was discovered in samples from Montgomery, Pulaski, Saline, and Sevier Counties . . . ores averaging 80 ounces of silver-with some samples as high as 788 ounces-per ton.