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Where’s the rush? The gold rush? In these hard times, get the lead out, grab a pick and a pan and go gold-grubbing.

Beneath southern and southwestern Guilford County lies gold, awaiting excavation at the current price of about $1,000 plus an ounce.

On TV, pitchman and former Watergate bad guy G. Gordon Liddy urges us to buy gold because it’s never been worth more, never been worthless, and the best might be yet to come.

Between 1840 and the early part of the 20th century, at least 10 mines removed gold from beneath Guilford. They included Fentress, North State, Hodges, Fisher Hill, Gardner Hill and Lindsay.

The old North State mine hauled away about $126,000 in gold and copper from the early 1800s until it closed in the 1880s.

Gardner Hill’s output may have totaled $100,000 in the 1840s.

Mining peaked here about 1849-50. Miners heard of more plentiful, easier-to-reach gold in California. Off rushed the “49ers,” to the Golden State. They later moved to the Canadian territories where bigger gold deposits were reported.

Guilford is part of the Carolina igneous belt. An 1896 book on North Carolina resources says $24 million worth of valuable metals, much of it gold, was taken from the state’s mines through the 19th century. In Guilford, the Fentress mine near Pleasant Garden was the deepest — with a main shaft of 400 feet.

Several mines had deep vertical shafts with horizontal shafts going off at right angles.

As many as 500 miners, their families and camp followers, (translate that as prostitutes) may have created a town in southwest Guilford. Not a trace remains except sealed mines and the engine house at the North State mine, now known as Castle McCullough.

The restored engine house can be rented for social events, and organized panning tours are conducted at the site.

Gold hunters started coming to North Carolina after 1799, when a 12-year-old boy, Conrad Reed, found a yellow rock weighing about 17 pounds in a Cabarrus County stream. It was used as a doorstop in the Reed home before being identified as gold.

Now, the nugget is viewable at the Reed Gold Mine State Historical Park.

Jim Simons, the state geologist, says he’s mildly surprised more people aren’t looking for gold. He says a group called him sometime ago about possibly reopening a mine in — he thinks — Randolph County — but nothing came of it.

Simons says if someone opened a mine he would know about it. Heavy-duty excavating would require permits from his office and other offices.

Panning in streams doesn’t require permits, and Simons is sure boots are getting wet in creeks.

He gets inquiries from time to time from people about panning. He says that five or 10 years ago, before the current economic downturn, prospectors in a stream found nuggets the size of marbles in what he believes was Montgomery County.

Simons assumes the absence of renewed heavy digging comes from knowing that the “easy stuff has been found.” The early miners made off with it.

Besides, gold mining doesn’t carry the romantic lore of old. Big-time operations require heavy machines, plus investors who are willing to gamble that the hole won’t turn up worthless dirt.

One of the last in Guilford to consider reopening a mine was the versatile cotton broker James E. Latham. He was co-developer of Fisher Park neighborhood. He considered but didn’t follow through on reopening the Gardner Hill mine during the Depression.

The idea of panning for gold shouldn’t be dismissed as not worth the time.

A 1973 story in the old Greensboro Record told of a Jamestown area man who in the 1930s panned streams near his home. He is said to have found enough to get him through the Depression.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net