Author's bio: In his first career, F. Andrew Dowdy worked in the oil business as a petroleum engineer, geologist, and corporate officer.  In his second, he served as a US diplomat, working on economic, energy and environmental issues, with tours in Washington, Mexico, Kuwait, Portugal, Brazil, and Iraq.  Since retiring from the State Department, one interest has been historical research.  Publications include a book “Wanderer on the American Frontier, the Travels of John Maley 1808-1813,” published by OU Press in 2018, and an article “John Lederer’s Lake, Another Hypothesis,” published in Terrae Incognitae in 2021.  Current areas of reseach include 17^th century mining in the Appalachians and the use of lidar imagery to investigate “pimple mounds” in the lower Mississippian valley.  In addition to historical research, Andrew has worked on energy access in the developing world, including as a volunteer with Engineers Without Borders.

Dowdy received a B.S. in geological engineering from the University of Oklahoma, an M.S. in national resource strategy from the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and studied economics at the Foreign Service Institute.

From a historical perspective, the picturesque town of Lincolnton, North Carolina is perhaps best known for the 1780 battle of Ramsour’s Mill. That Revolutionary War fight pitted brother against brother and neighbor against neighbor and was a bloody preview of the pivotal Battle of Kings Mountain three months later. According to accounts of early settlers of the town, however, Ramsours Mill was not the first battle to take place at the site. It was preceded a century or more earlier by a bloody fight between white gold miners and Cherokee tribesmen – an event that never made it into the history books.

The source of this story is a excerpt of the manuscript of Wallace M. Reinhardt, held at the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives. Wallace Reinhardt, born in 1819 at Lincolnton, personally knew veterans of the Battle of Ramsour’s Mill and his written account of that event, based on their recollections, has provided a detailed picture of the battle. The document found at the Archives appears to be a fragment, separated from Reinhardt’s larger manuscript that focused on the earlier history of the first settlers in the Lincolnton region. It was dictated by Reinhardt to his son-in-law, W. A. Fair, and was submitted to the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology in 1900. Aside from a brief reference in James Mooney’s 1902 “Myths of the Cherokees,” the document has not appeared in the public record.

Wallace Reinhardt was a direct descendent of Christian Reinhardt, an early settler who came to the region in the 1750’s. According to oral accounts passed down to Wallace Reinhardt, the first settlers found extensive remains of previous activity in the area, including a dam of “well-squared rock” across Clarke’s Creek, about one-half mile north of the site where Ramsour’s Mill would be built. At one end of the dam was a wooden trough to conduct water around the dam, with the wood worn down to scarcely one-eight of an inch thick. East of the creek were large pits where rock had been excavated. West of the creek the settlers found numerous pillars of cut stone, resembling supports for houses, with large trees growing among them, and an old rock-lined well 70-80 feet deep. Several hundred yards south there were wood-lined sinks on the creek bottom and piles of burned gravel on the ridge to the west. This evidence pointed to an extensive placer mining operation, carried out many years earlier. The technique, which has been employed for millennia, uses water flowing down a sluice or trough to separate heavier gold dust and nuggets from other sediment.

The manuscript also relates an account by an old Cherokee chief called “The Little Carpenter” who periodically visited Christian Reinhardt to trade furs. On one of these visits, the chief told Reinhardt that a battle had occurred at the site between white miners and his ancestors “a thousand moons” earlier, noting that a large number of Cherokee warriors and a handful of “pale-faces” were killed. The Cherokee dead were buried near the dam on Clarke’s Creek and the dead whites were buried further downstream. Christian Reinhardt noted that whenever the chief visited, he and the women accompanying him would place rocks on a cairn at the site to honor the fallen warriors. Wallace Reinhardt recalled that, years later, when he was a boy, his horse stumbled into a grave when he was plowing land near the creek and father uncovered a skeleton of a large individual at the site.

It is not clear when this battle would have occurred, but the “Little Carpenter” was the English name for “Attakullakulla,” a prominent Cherokee chief involved in various negotiations for the tribe between 1730 and his death around 1778. Christian Reinhardt described him as a very old man at the time of the conversation, implying that it may have taken place as late as the 1770’s. According to Attakullakulla’s account, the battle would have presumably taken place some time in the 1600’s or earlier.

There is no historical account of mining near Lincolnton prior to the 1800’s North Carolina gold rush. However, the Spanish explorer Juan Pardo passed through the area during his 1566-1568 exploration of the Carolinas and Tennessee, and some scholars believe that the indigenous town of “Yssa” he encountered was near present day Lincolnton. Veterans of the Pardo expeditions were known to have subsequently discovered minerals and gemstones in the interior but it is not clear where those activities took place. Furthermore, throughout the 1600’s there were recurring reports, from both Spanish and English sources, of mysterious white miners in the mountains. Finally, there are well documented reports of other mining sites in the southern Appalachians that predated the first settlers. Various European artifacts have been found, for example, in ancient mine shafts along the Valley River north of Murphy and near Franklin. Similarly, in the 1830’s gold miners at Duke’s Creek in northeast Georgia uncovered signs of a previous, much older placer operation.

Visitors to Lincolnton today can visit the site of the battle of Ramsour’s Mill at the town’s Battleground Park. There they will find a replica of the log cabin of Christian Reinhardt, and by wandering down to Clark’s Creek they can trace the remains of the dam built for the mill. They won’t, however, find any evidence of the earlier mysterious miners or their battle with the Cherokee. There is no sign of the dam of “well-squared rock” further upstream – its stones and those found elsewhere were undoubtedly appropriated for other uses. Nor is there any sign of the graves of those who fought and fell in that earlier battle. Our only tenuous link to this intriguing bit of history is a short handwritten account buried deep in the archives of the Smithsonian.