THROUGH
MOUNTAIN MISTS
Early Settlers of
Their
Descendants...Their Stories...Their Achievements
Lifting the
Mists of History on Their Way of Life
By: Ethelene Dyer Jones
A Gold
Prospector Named Hamby
Stories
abound about those who hoped to make their fortune from gold found in
Union
County mines. One told by the late
Preston Turner and Robert Corn is about a mysterious fellow named C. A.
Hamby
who spent eighteen or more months prospecting along Coosa Creek.
The story goes something like
this. It was a cold rainy morning in
1937. Robert Corn was with his father,
John, and a neighbor, hunting on Duncan Ridge.
There they came upon a man digging along a creek bank. He was unkempt, dirty and looked like a
hobo. The hunters learned from him that
he had made himself a temporary shelter from bark but would like a more
permanent place to stay while prospecting for gold.
The Corn family took him in. They
learned his name was C. A.
Hamby, he had been born in Western North Carolina, and that he
had spent
fourteen years teaching in an Indian school in Oklahoma.
Mr. Hamby spent most of his days during the
next eighteen months out on Coosa Creek and elsewhere digging for gold. He brought in a pound nugget that was assayed
at a value of $420.00. In those
days,
with the nation trying to recuperate from the Great Depression, that
was no
small find.
With John Corn’s help, Hamby boxed up
and shipped forty-five pounds of quartz to a mining company in London,
England. The company assayed the ore and
made a proposal that if other ore were as rich in gold as the sample,
the
England Company would finance up to a million dollars to set up mining
operations in the area. They instructed
C. A. Hamby to purchase mineral rights so that the project could move
forward.
As happens with the best laid plans,
history interfered and England declared war on Germany on September 3,
1939. That London Mining Company could
not proceed with plans to finance a gold mine in Union County.
However, Mr. Hamby seemed to have an
alternative plan. After his eighteen
months of prospecting, he told the Corns that he was going to Seymour,
Indiana. He knew a wealthy lady there
who could finance the venture. He would
go, possibly marry her, and then return with the necessary equipment to
mine
the rich vein of ore he had found. The
nuggets had rich gold on one side and were white on the other side.
On November 2, 1939, John Corn walked
with his boarder to Owltown Gap. Hamby
was carrying a small pouch of gold nuggets and had only the clothes on
his
back. The men bade each other farewell.
Later in the day, Mr. W. H. Nix saw C.
A. Hamby. He was carrying two heavy
suitcases which he did not have when he left the Corn residence. Hamby boarded the bus at Harve Davis’s store,
still with the two suitcases in tow.
On November 10, 1939, John Corn
received a letter from C. A. Hamby. He
had, indeed, reached Seymour, Indiana, and there the “wealthy lady” had
become
his wife. She had agreed to finance the
mining venture. He asked Mr. Corn to
hire ten to fifteen men to begin mining operations.
He would be back soon to supervise the
operations.
Who was this wealthy lady? Her
name, if ever known in Union County, has
been lost to time. But it is
reported
that she, herself, came to investigate the situation.
She said that C. A. Hamby had borrowed $450.
00 from her to go to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or to Virginia to
purchase mining
equipment to send to Union County. As he
left her in Indiana, he had the same two heavy suitcases with which he
was seen
leaving Union County.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation
was called into the case. Four men, two
in New York and two in San Francisco, were caught trying to smuggle raw
gold
out of the country. That raw gold, by
the nature of its golden patina, was identified as gold from Coosa
Creek. Was one of these four men the
mysterious C.
A. Hamby? Or had he been robbed of
his
heavy suitcases, maybe even murdered?
Were others trying to make a fortune from his eighteen months of
prospecting and hiding his gold-filled ore?
The unfinished story of Prospector
Hamby and his gold cache lies somewhere in the hidden records of
mountain
mists. Perhaps someone with a propensity
for a novel will delve a little deeper and come up with a like-life
story of
the Corn family’s boarder who made off with two suitcases of Union
County gold
ore.
[Ethelene
Dyer Jones
is a retired educator, freelance writer, poet, and historian. She
may be
reached at e-mail edj0513@windstream.net;
phone 478-453-8751; or mail 1708 Cedarwood Road, Milledgeville, GA
31061-2411.]
Updated October
4, 2008
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