By Richard Weinstein, President & COO
Ocean Reef Community Foundation
We recently returned from California where we spent some time in Yountville with Preferred Partners John and Mary Lee’s Fine Wine Society and our newest Preferred Partner, Karen Crouse of Mount Veeder Magic Vineyards. Yes, this area is now famous for wine, but originally, it was named for George Yount who had a flour mill on the nearby river.
I wondered at first how milling flour could be so lucrative, but then realized that he opened his business just before the 1849 gold rush and clearly capitalized on the influx of people on their way to “strike it rich.” The only way more assured than that to strike it rich in the gold rush was to sell the shovels! Of course, if you are our Preferred Partner, Lester Lampert Jewellers (those two LL’s are on purpose), GOLD is very much a part of everyday life, but for the rest of us, “gold” actually plays a more notable part of common language than one might imagine.
The first of the three major gold rushes in the US began in 1799 and was not out west, but in the Appalachian Mountains and Piedmont regions of North Carolina, just 10 years after that expanse became the 12th state in the Union. North Carolina remained the largest gold producer until 1849, a year after the start of the California Gold Rush. That western one lasted until about 1855 and was followed a few years later by the shorter-lived Alaska Gold Rush of 1896-1899. While during the Alaska rush, where they were actually looking for gold, in North Carolina and California, the “rush” started with accidental discoveries of the precious metal while doing something else.
So how exactly does one “find” gold? It typically collects in veins that are lodged between quartz deposits, so one way to find it is to look for these deposits. This is called “lode gold.” But, there are way more quartz deposits without gold than with it, so the second way (and where all three of the aforementioned gold rushes started) is to find what is called “placer gold” (also known as “alluvial”). Over time as mountains erode, their related minerals and rocks tend to wash downhill into rivers and streams. Wintertime freezing and thawing widens cracks and loosens these minerals; they then tumble and wash further down the river. Gold (if there is any), being the heaviest of all these minerals, will “fall out” of the stream earlier than most anything else and often settle on the bedrock. This happens in the first location where the river can slow down enough to allow the gold to drop out, typically around a tight bend (on the inside edge where the water is slower) or on the downstream side of large boulders.
To find this placer gold, those on the hunt would just have to dig down in the stream and gather this dirt (which is called “pay dirt” when it contains gold), and then they would use a sluice followed by a gold pan to take the pay dirt and see if it “pans out” with gold.
So there are a few expressions derived from gold. Perhaps more common is to “strike it rich,” which involved finding a “bonanza” (yes, this Spanish word was adopted by gold miners for an exceptionally rich find). Then, of course, there is “gold mine,” which we use to describe anything from data to coming upon a large quantity of great stuff. Lastly, when doing very well we might say “I cleaned up,” meaning you got everything you could from that endeavor. The origins for that phrase are related to taking the raw gold, which was often mixed with other minerals, and refining it to pure gold (24 KT. = 100 percent gold, 18Kt = 75 percent gold and then other metals or 14kt which is 58.5 percent gold)
So this is what happened when I was drinking wine in Napa and started to think about this year’s All Charities Gala: We don’t need to “strike it rich,” we just need to raise sufficient funds to enable our on-Reef Recipient Partners (the Medical Center, Cultural Center, Academy, Art League, ORCAT, Conservation Association, and Chapel and Fellowship Center) to continue to enhance everyday life at Ocean Reef, and to carry on with the meaningful Community Grants to the surrounding areas beyond Ocean Reef, enabling them to excel in the important work they do for so many in need.
The result of my musings is the knowledge that, with your help and the support of all of our Preferred Partners, we are looking forward to a fun and exciting auction next month where we will be selling some really, really nice “shovels”!!!
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