Peter (enslaved miner, Reed Gold Mine)

Peter was an enslaved African American man held at the Reed gold mine in Cabarrus County, North Carolina, in the first years of the nineteenth century. In 1803, when John Reed and three partners began working the gravels of Little Meadow Creek with equipment and enslaved laborers supplied by the partnership, Peter unearthed a gold nugget weighing about 28 pounds — the largest ever found on the property, surpassing even the 17-pound stone that had first revealed the gold four years earlier. The nugget's considerable value went entirely to the men who claimed ownership of him.

As with most enslaved people of his time and place, the documentary record of Peter's life is painfully thin: his surname, his birth, his family, and his ultimate fate went largely unrecorded. What survives is the fact of his find and the system it illuminates.

Peter's story stands for the wider, mostly anonymous role of enslaved labor in the Carolina and Georgia gold fields. Enslaved men and women dug shafts, hauled and washed ore, and produced a substantial share of the antebellum South's gold — skilled and dangerous work performed without pay or choice, and long left out of gold rush histories that remembered only the owners of the mines.