gold in them thar hills

I've decided to move. Okay, not really, but I did fall in love with this little place over the weekend:

We went up for the parade, and found a beautiful town in the Appalachian foothills. Dahlonega has a pretty little town square, with a gold museum, gift shops, and local restaurants with open-air porches. And all of it's nestled, actually nestled down in huge old trees and rolling hills.

Why does it have a gold museum, you ask? (Glad you asked...)

According to Dahlonega's sign up there, it's the site of the first U.S. Gold rush. As in, the one that produced the gold leafing for the dome of the state capitol building in Atlanta. It also produced the gold leafing for the steeple of this building:

which is explained in this marker here:

There was also this marker, on the way out of town:

which I was hardly close enough to get a great picture of.

Seems the assayor of the mint in Dahlonega stood on the steps of the courthouse in 1849 (as in "met a miner 49-er") and gave a speech in which he tried to dissuade miners from leaving to join the California gold rush, saying, "Thar's gold in them thar hills!" and gesturing at the surrounding countryside.

My husband, who is from California, of course felt that he had to defend the superiority of that state's gold rush, and scoffed at Georgia's "little gold rush". "35 million?" he said snidely, "Pocket change."

But before we left we were both looking up properties there on our Blackberries. Sure, we do this about every place we go, but we half meant it about Dahlonega.