My primary reason for writing this article is to share with readers a small but fascinating bit of monetary history. It is a story commemorated by a historical marker in Gainesville, Georgia that reads as follows:

There's a lot more to the story than you can fit on a sign, and it speaks favorably about markets, entrepreneurship, and competitive choices in money.

The 1829 gold rush in the north Georgia mountains was the biggest in America before the fabled discovery of the yellow metal in California 20 years later. At the time, though the official policy of the US government was bimetallism (both gold and silver coin in circulation), the practical effect of Washington's price-fixing was to put the country on a de facto silver standard. Gold was obviously in demand, but the government minted very little. The Southern Gold Society states, "Some estimates indicate that there was less than one federally minted coin per person in the United States."

So, as the sign says, Templeton Reid was the first to fill the void by opening his own mint. Where there's a demand, some enterprising man or woman will rush to provide a supply if given the freedom to do so. In The Georgia Gold Rush: Twenty-Niners, Cherokees and Gold Fever, author David Williams says, "This was exactly what the miners needed-a place to exchange their gold for coin at a not too distant location."

Previously, miners had to take their gold to the government's mint in Philadelphia. Not until 1835 did the Congress see the value of opening mints in the gold regions of North Carolina (in Charlotte) and Georgia (in Dahlonega).

Now what about the Reid mint's short life? The sign says it opened in 1830 and closed in 1831. There's a story and a lesson to that as well.

Templeton Reid had good intentions but lacked the sophistication to get the proper fineness of gold into each coin he minted. What he stamped as a $10 gold piece, for instance, turned out to be fractionally less pure gold than the coin's denomination indicated-as the dollar was then defined and as gold was then worth in the marketplace. You might assume Reid was dishonest, but the consensus of historians seems to be that it was imprecision, not fraud, that caused the problem. Williams writes,

To read the complete article, see:
A Georgia Gold Rush Story: The Rise and Fall of America's First Private Gold-Coin Mint(https://fee.org/articles/a-georgia-gold-rush-story-the-rise-and-fall-of-americas-first-private-gold-coin-mint/)

For more information, see:
First Private Mint Templeton Reid Mint1830-1831(https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=14882)