Back in the 1960s there was still at least one pot-bellied stove in Gold Hill.
Will Martin’s store had a square spittoon enclosure with sand in it for the tobacco chewers. And you could always find a crate or a box to sit on.
I walked into the store in 1965 while doing a series of stories on Gold Hill. Martin, who was 76 at the time, and a friend of his, John Morgan, 83, were discussing the old days.
I asked if either of them ever actually met Walter George Newman, who was the last man to operate gold mines in the area, from 1898 to 1915.
“Did we know him!” Morgan said. “If you lived anywhere near Gold Hill, you knew Walter George Newman.”
“Yeah,” put in Martin. “Remember that night we took him to Salisbury?”
Morgan pushed back his wide-brimmed, Western-style hat and smiled.
“I’ll never forget it,” he said.
“John here,” said Martin, “had an old car — what kind was it, John?”
“It was a Maxwell,” replied Morgan, grinding his homemade walking stick into the box of sand around the stove.
“Well, anyway,” continued Martin, “Walter George called John one night and asked him to take him to Salisbury. And John wanted me to go with him.”
“I told Walter the old car might not make it,” Morgan put in. “But he said, ‘Let’s try it anyway.’ Water ran out of the radiator about as fast as you put it in.”
“Not only that, but I told you he wouldn’t pay you for going,” said Martin.
The two men picked Newman up and started off toward Salisbury. On the way they had to stop to fill the car with water. It was there, said Morgan, that Newman showed the men two bars of gold. When they finally arrived in Salisbury, Morgan asked Newman where he wanted out.
“On the public square,” said Newman.
“So I drove to the Square and stopped,” Morgan said. “Newman got out of the car and walked across the street without saying as much as thank you, goodbye or anything. The only thing he said was to wait there for two more men who would ride back to Gold Hill with us.”
A few minutes later, Charlie Montgomery, one of Newman’s mining superintendents, showed up with a man from Greensboro who had invested in some stock. They were carrying two grips, which Morgan and Martin figured contained the payroll for the mines. The four started off toward Gold Hill.
The men stopped for water a couple of times on their way back. They were about three miles from home when they had to cross a creek with 5 or 6 inches of water.
“There weren’t bridges then as there are now,” said Martin. “And we got about halfway across when there was this awful noise in the back and the car stopped. The rear end had fallen out.”
The four men got out of the car. Montgomery and the Greensboro man said they would walk on if Martin and Morgan could bring the grips with them.
“We knew there was no way to fix the car,” said Morgan. “So we just pushed the car out of the road, grabbed the two grips and started walking.”
It was about 2 a.m. when the two reached home.
The next morning they took the grips to Montgomery at the mine and told him it was payday.
“Payday, nothing,” said Montgomery. “There’s nothing in those grips except clothes.”
“Did you ever get paid for the trip?” asked Martin.
“Yeah,” said Morgan, “but not from Newman.”
Martin leaned back on the cask.
“There was one thing about Walter George,” he said. “No matter what kind of a man he was, he kept the mines running and people eating. Why, he could whitewash a few trees and put a mine in operation before you knew what was happening.”
Martin was born in Gold Hill, as was his father before him. His grandparents came from England. Both father and son worked for years in the Gold Hill mines.
Morgan, also a native of Gold Hill, operated a number of businesses during his earlier years, including a grocery store, a livery stable, a sawmill, a vaudeville show and a one-ring circus.
Newman died broke in a New York hotel room in 1936.
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