Agrarianism, Industry, the Environment, and Change: Gold Mining in Antebellum North Carolina, 1799-1860

Using personal correspondence, geological surveys, travelers’ accounts, and tools and methodologies borrowed from other studies of mineral extraction, this thesis argues that gold mining in North Carolina was an important aspect of southern antebellum industry. It traces the development of the industry from the agrarian, subsistence-agriculture based society that characterized the western and southern Piedmont counties of the state into the increasingly mechanized, modernized, and economically stratified society of the late antebellum period. The economic changes that the state underwent during the first half of the nineteenth century occurred alongside significant environmental alterations. Because these economic and environmental changes were intimately linked, this thesis argues that agrarians and industrialists had differing views of the environment. Cataloguing the environmental consequences of the gold mining industry presents a fuller understanding of the process of economic change and sheds light on the complex and vacillating relationship between people and the environment.