History on a Stick with Michael C. Hardy

History on a Stick:

Spruce Pine Mining District

By Michael C. Hardy

Mention the Spruce Pine Mining District, and the area right around the town of Spruce Pine in Mitchell County comes to mind. However, Spruce Pine sits in the middle of the mining district. The whole district extends for 25 miles, from Avery County through Mitchell, and into Yancey County.

Stories left by the earliest settlers make mention of the evidence left behind in mines worked by Native Americans, or perhaps the Spanish, centuries before the settlers themselves arrived in the late 1700s. Massive trees were found growing in old mine pits or nearby spoil piles, indicating how long ago the sites had been active. Formal mining by European settlers in the area really begins at the Cranberry Iron Ore mines in Avery County. Iron ore was commercially mined prior to and during the Civil War, but within two decades after the war, a rail line had reached Cranberry from Tennessee, and mining took off at Cranberry. Cranberry was one of the major iron ore suppliers in the South until the mine closed in 1929, victim of the Great Depression.

In the 1870s and 1880s, a commercial market became available for mica. John G. Heap and Elisha B. Clapp arrived in the Toe River Valley to explore the mica deposits. They mined at the Sink Hole Mine and the mica mines in Clarissa. Most of this mica was used in stoves and as gas lamp shades. In 1881, Thomas Edison invented an electrical motor using mica as an insulator. The first mica mining craze was underway as mica was used in many electric products. The demand lasted through World War I, but the Great Depression and cheap mica from India slowed production in the Toe River Valley. World War II brought an increase of demand, and three-fourths of all mica in the world was coming from western North Carolina. The Meadow Mine on Doublehead Mountain is said to have produced more mica than any

CRANBERRY MINES IN AVERY COUNTY

HISTORY ON A STICK

MICA PIT IN MITCHELL COUNTY

other mine in history. The demand continued into the 1960s, but today it is once again cheaper to get mica from overseas.

Gold and silver were mined at times in the area. Former United States Senator and Confederate general Thomas L. Clingman was digging for silver at the Sink Hole Mine when he began pulling out mica. Clingman also mined for silver in the 1870s on Beech Creek on Beech Mountain. On several occasions, people have mined for gold on Grandfather Mountain, finding small quantities.

A host of other minerals have been mined in the Toe River Valley over the centuries: aquamarine, kaolin, feldspar, corundum, columbite, lead, clay, kyanite, olivine, asbestos, and many others. It is estimated that at least 247 different minerals and rocks have been found in the Spruce Pine Mining District.

In 2005, students from Harris Middle School helped to erect a North Carolina Highway Historical Marker at the Museum of North Carolina Minerals in Spruce Pine. It is located at the intersection of the Blue Ridge Parkway and NC226.