America's Oldest Mountains

'There's Gold In Them There Hills!'

The Hidden History of Oldest Mountain Chain in the USA 

Kimsey Farm on Old Mountain looking south.

A few miles outside of my small city is a beautiful rural area. The northernmost features of the Uwharrie Mountain chain are scattered along a section of eastern Davidson and western Randolph counties. These old mountains are called the Caraway Mountains. Their rolling hills begin just south of High Point, and the Uwharrie range extends south into Montgomery county. The unassuming landscape hides a most impressive history. 

There are some subdivisions where families sold off land during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, but there is also undeveloped acreage of hardwoods; black walnut, sycamore, oak, birch, and dogwood, along with pine trees planted for harvesting. There are fields of tobacco, corn, and soy beans, and occasional cow pastures, too. The hillsides are dotted with old wooden farm houses. The roads were originally built for horses and wagons not automobiles. Some of those old wagon roads lead to my grandfather's farm. 

The 150 year old farm house sits in a valley in northwestern Randolph county North Carolina at the intersection of Fuller Mill and Old Mountain Roads. From north to south Old Mountain begins in the small town of Trinity (original home of Duke University, founded as Trinity College in 1859). Old Mountain Road begins at a roundabout on Finch Farm road and winds around the top and down the incline of an 800 foot slope to a valley and then up the next 800 foot peak. The community on this part of the old mountain chain is called Tabernacle, it is to the west of the town of Thomasville and south of Trinity. Fuller Mill Road follows along the valley west and then north around one of the mountains to Thomasville. To the east it goes toward Caraway and then the pavement loops back north around to Finch Farm Road, named after land owner and Thomasville furniture industry pioneer Thomas Finch. 

The original Fuller Mill Road continues as a rural gravel route through farmland to the site of the three story grist mill on the Little Uwharrie River. There is no longer visible evidence of the structure which once brought farmers from all around the area to mill their wheat. The mill was built by landowner Allen Skeen in 1861.

The surrounding community was called Eden at the time, though little evidence of it remains there were 25 families there by 1880 when Isham Fuller bought into the operation. In 1911 the area to the south of Eden was listed as Fuller's. The Skeen's and Fuller's took turns running the mill over the next century and it remained a working mill until the 1970's.  (Click here for my 'secret' Thomasville burger recipe, called the Skeen burger.) 

Mills were the center of many communities in this area of the piedmont, as early as the 1700's. Unique geological features created spring fed creeks and rivers that had clean water which flowed at a strong enough rate to power large mills. Land owners cleared the area of trees, milling the lumber to build homes, barns, and whatever structures their communities requires. The cleared land was then used for farming. 

In 1799 a boy playing in a creek on his family's farm found a large yellow rock and took it home. The 17 pound gold hunk was used as a doorstop until the boy's unknowledgeable father sold it for a few dollars. After learning the true value of the rock the farmer got some business partners and began prospecting. In 1803 the men (with the help of slaves) found a huge piece of gold weighing 28 pounds. News spread quickly and land owners in the area rushed to set up their own gold operations, mining the surface of the streams and creeks, (known as placer mining). This started off America's first gold rush. Placer mines were exhausted within 20 years and experienced miners from coal and iron industries set up shop to mine the gold from its source; veins deep in the old mountains. To handle the large amount of gold found in the region the first US branch mint was built in Charlotte to specialize in coinage. Previously the gold had to make the dangerous journey all the way north to Philadelphia. Of course the Civil War interrupted all of this but after as things attempted to reconstruct the mint cemented Charlotte as the financial capital of the state. The gold rush was over and the land had been almost completely cleared of lumber, agriculture returned to the area and continued for the next 100 years. President John F. Kennedy made part of the Uwharries a National Forrest though the plan began decades before as the government began promoting reforestation and removal of farmers from the land.  

Both the Caraway's and the Uwharries take their names from native tribes that lived in the area before the European invasion. Tribes which no longer exist. Numerous archeological sites have been found in the old mountains. The same rivers that attracted early settlers had been useful to the native people who artifacts show lived and traded in the area for over 12,000. Many of the roads in the area may have been technically built, cleared, and rutted out by the invading pioneers, but they began as narrow trails through the then heavily forested hills and valleys. Quartz from the mountains were carved into tools and arrow heads and traded across the east. 

All of this interesting history is really but a speck of dust to these old mountains. Their history is on a scale hard for us to even understand. 

Scientific investigation and careful analysis of core samples and the fossil record have lead geologists and biologists to agree that early animal life evolved from one celled organisms approximately 550 million years ago. These earliest critters were simple soft bodied sea creatures. It wasn't until 500 million years ago that animal life diversified. 410 million years ago animals finally slithered out of the water and began to evolve on the land. 65 million years ago just as the continental plates were arriving in their current locations and volcanic and seismic activity was beginning to slow, the earth was impacted by the massive extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, along with 75% of the plant and animal life on the planet. 

These old mountains, the oldest mountains in the United States, predate all of that. The young earth was not the earth we know today. The crust's various plates were not in the positions they are now. The land that was not covered in oceans was barren rock, cooled magma from within the young earth. All life was in the water. There was less oxygen in the atmosphere without the abundant plant life that makes us a green and blue planet. The sky would have been clouded with matter from seismic and volcanic activity that was common as plates shifted. Much of the land we know was then being birthed as the crust moved along on top of the molten layers beneath. 

These mountains are located with in the Carolina Terrane, a geological formation which runs 370 miles from central Georgia to central Virginia and makes up the largest part of the piedmont region. The terrane formed 625 million years ago in an area where tectonic plates met in a subduction zone off the coast of the prehistoric continent geologists call Gondwana. In the area where the plates were pressing together the force caused volcanic activity which built an arc of islands (like Hawaii). 

Today, the old mountains are softly rolling hills that max out just above 1,100 feet in elevation, but in their hay day they towered 20,000 feet above sea level. As millions of years passed tectonic movement pushed the massive volcanic island arc across the ocean where it collided with another continent to help form what is now North America. The Carolina Terrane had a big part in the tectonic evolution of North America's east coast. During the Paleozoic era the mountain chain was no longer islands alone in the ocean; the zone where these mountains met with the younger North American plate was a collision zone that created some of the massive amounts of sediment which would eventually form the coastal plain. 

Volcanic rock from the pre-Cambrian islands makes up the Carolina slate belt, an area within the Carolina Terrane. There is deformation from shear and areas of intrusion which consist of high quality quartz crystals formed by magma flow, from the collisions during the Paleozoic, but many of the hills that make up the Uwharrie Mountains are dark colored green to black metavolcanic rock covered in a layer of red to yellow/gray sediment left there by erosion.

During Earth's early stages meteorites packed with gold and other metals bombarded its oozy surface. While the formation of the planet continued, molten metals sank to its center to make the core. During the seismic shifts of planetary development volcanic eruptions carried these metals back up to the surface where they were then deposited as veins within the newly formed crust. The volcanos that formed our oldest mountains also pushed up veins of molten metals such as gold and silver. Gold deposits within the Carolina slate belt are considered some of the world's oldest.