A new park in a former gold mining town will encourage visitors to pan for information while strolling through nature.
Anyone who visits the 9.2-acre Gold Mine Park will be able to view the entrance to one of the city’s mine shafts and learn about the days of panning for gold in Sugar Hill, a northern Gwinnett city with close to 25,000 residents.
The city plans to break ground on the park this month. The park will open by spring 2022 at the latest, though officials hope to open it for guests by December of this year, said City Manager Paul Radford.
The $930,000 project at Level Creek Road will serve as a trailhead to the city’s greenway system, a 16-mile trail that will cross Ga. 20 and loop around the city.
“I want people to have a sense of community and a sense of place,” Councilmember Brandon Hembree said. “Knowledge about an area’s history, I think that plays a great role in that. I hope (the park) helps people understand more about where they live and how Sugar Hill came to be what it is today.”
Early settlers in Sugar Hill started panning for gold in the early 1800s, Hembree said. The activity peaked in the late 1800s before slowing down around the 1950s, he said.
“From what we can tell, nobody got rich from mining gold in Sugar Hill,” Hembree said. “In most cases, the mine operators were local families. I think it was an additional way to augment their income that they made from farming, timber or any other various ways they earned money for their families.”
Gold mining never garnered the same level of fame in Sugar Hill as it did in the northeast Georgia town of Dahlonega, Hembree said. But approximately 13 mines, now abandoned and scattered across the city, operated at one point, he said.
The property for the park came up for sale a few years ago. Hembree learned about the mine shaft on the lot, which sparked the interest of city leaders to construct a park for residents to view it.
The damp mine shaft is just “big enough for someone to slide down into,” Hembree said. It is now the home of bats, cave crickets and salamanders. The 25- to 50-yard long shaft begins with a high, cathedral-like ceiling, he said, shrinking in height toward the end of it.
The mine is carved into a quartz vein, Hembree said, as opposed to the dirt mines held up by wooden pillars that exist in the western U.S. Due to safety concerns, park visitors won’t be able to enter the cave, but there will be a viewing platform for people to see the entrance and read information about gold mining.
The city has made an effort to bring up its history of gold mining in recent years, Hembree said, in the hopes of differentiating itself from neighboring cities. The councilmember said he sometimes sees people looking for gold in the tributaries that run into the Chattahoochee River.
Besides the homage to the city’s history, the park will include a playground, bike racks, 50 parking spaces and restrooms. Trails on the Sugar Hill greenway, a $16 million project that the city expects to complete in five years, will meander through Gold Mine Park.
“Gold Mine Park was an opportunity to purchase a piece of our history,” Radford said, “but also to make it easy to use for another purpose — to easily get out and walk, bike or run ... and being in the middle of the woods and experiencing the natural beauty of a part of our city.”
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