EGGINK
GOLD NOTES
 
Fluvanna Dredge and  Submarine Excavation Company
Metamorphic Petrology
Multiphase Research

Jesus Christ is Lord

We at FLUVANNA have been extracting gold from metamorphic ore across North America from Fluvanna County, Virginia, to Eldorado, Siskyou and Monterey Counties in California.

Long Island Gold Mine
by
Daniel Francis Eggink

      The Long Island Gold Mine  was first opened by George Pace in the 1830's. George was born in Goochland and was a descendent of John Pace of Middlesex County in "tidewater Virginia". He was also descended from the Clements and Houchin families. George married Catherine Lipford, daughter of Revolutionary War veteran, Henry Lipford, who resided in Cumberland County, Virginia, on bounty land he received for his service on the Continental Line. (Battle of Kings Mountain in North Carolina).
       George and Catherine took care of the old vet in his last years and when Henry died he willed the property and 3 slaves to Catherine, who sold the real estate and financed the purchase of 102 acres near Palmyra on Long Island Creek in Fluvanna County, abutting Commodore Stockton's busy gold mine. George and Catherine, together with their 3 aging slaves and a brood of children, became members of the nearby Lyle Baptist Church and hand-worked their own gold mine until the "War between the States" broke out in 1860.
       The mine, like others in Virginia, was concealed from the invading "yankees" and the Pace boys marched off with "The Sons of Fluvanna" to defend "Dixie", a sweet little Fluvanna town near Columbia and the James River Canal.
      After the war, eldest son Henry Randolfe Pace, moved to Ohio with his wife, Jordy Flannigan, but that marriage failed and he returned to Richmond, Virginia, to be in the real estate business. He married Margaret Callaghan, owner of the boarding house where he lodged near the State Capitol, and fathered a daughter, Julia Pace.
      Margaret was the twice married daughter of Oliver and Elvira Callaghan of Fincastle in Bottetourt County. Her first marriage was to a young southerner surnamed Phelps, who was killed in the war. Her second, to a northerner named Mr. Howard, causing her estrangement from her father, brothers and sisters. Margaret did, however, maintain contact with her mother, Elvira, who was the daughter of Fincastle merchant, Robert Wiley, by his first marriage to the enchanting Mary Ann Waldron Mason, widow of  "French Mason of Pohick". She was also the sister of Sydney Major Waldron, who eloped with 6 foot 7 inch David Henson, son of Irish linen makers, living near the Waldron's walled deerpark at Carrick on Shannon, and founder of Hensonville in Russell County, Virginia.
     Mary Ann and Sydney Major appear to have been the runaway daughters of Vaughn Waldron of Carrick on Shannon in County Leitrem, Ireland, following the death of their mother and the remarriage of their father. According to the letter Elvira passed on to Margaret, sometime in the middle 1790s Sydney was discovered in her bedroom with 6 foot 6 inch David Henson who escaped by leaping from her window into the adjoining deerpark but was revealed by the hat he left behind. The family would not give permission for her to marry the socially inferior David Henson so she eloped with him. As she was already pregnant, her younger sister, Mary Ann, accompanied her to help with the expected infant. They sailed from Belfast and the baby was born at sea, dying soon afterward. It's likely that a younger brother, Thomas Waldron, assisted with the escape and, like the sisters, was rejected by the rest of the Waldron family.
      When the runaways arrived in Norfolk, Virginia, Mary Ann was no longer needed to help her sister and she quickly met and married French Mason whose Potomic plantation, "Pohick", lay between George Washington's Mount Vernon and  uncle George Mason's "Gunston Hall" in Fairfax County.
      David Henson and Sydney traveled up the James River to Roanoke then south, acquiring property a few miles west of Abingdon in Russell County. The large home David built for them was still standing in Hensonville when we visited in 1988.
       French Mason and Mary Ann had only a few years together before he died as the result of a thorn penitrating his boot, causing infection and leaving her a widow with an infant daughter, Catherine. Mason family members challenged her right to "Pohick". Robert Wiley, a successful businessman with interests up and down the Shanadoah Valley, came to her rescue and obtained a good settlement for Mary Ann befor marrying her and settling in Finecastle.
       It's highly likely Robert Wiley was in the whiskey business  because at that time there was a Wiley's Inn in nearby Wileysburg now called Mt.Pleasant on the edge of Washington, D.C. and he was a frequent visitor to" Callaghans Inn" at the beginning of the Allegheny Turnpike, run by his good friend, Dennis O'Callaghan. Robert seems to have been from a clan of Wileys who settled at Sinking Springs in Craig County, southwest of Roanoke. He and Mary Ann had two children, Elvira and Ferdinand. Elvira married Oliver Callaghan, first clerk of Allegheny County and son of Dennis O'Callaghan.
       Julia Pace, granddaughter of Elvira and Oliver Callaghan married Howard T. Pitts of West Point on the York River, son of Captain Simeon Pitts, a Norfolk shipbuilder, and Amanda Richardson of "Croaker", a plantation near Williamsburg.
       Julia Pace's father, Henry Randolfe Pace, had bought out his mother Catherine and brother Andrew's interest in the mineral rights to the gold mine though
       Catherine Pace retained lifetime tenency on the property. Henry then leased the mineral rights to a mining company that never did any thing with the lease, because Catherine's tenency prevented any explority development until after her death, being that she was very old. Well, she lived to be 110 and outlived both of them so they never mined any of the gold. Henry died when Julia was very young so she only knew of the gold mine because of stories told to her by her mother, Margaret and Margaret did not know Catherine. Catherine Pace died in the 1920s. The mine became a vague family legend and there was no remembrance of the old lady in Fluvanna County.
        Meanwhile, in Fluvanna County, an old gent by the surname of Page had moved on to the property to assist the aged Catherine and after she died he continued to live in the Pace log cabin until his own death in the 1930s. The property was then auctioned off by the county to pay back taxes, everyone locally thinking it was Page property. They even referred to the mine as the Page Mine.
        Julia Pace, the only child of Henry Randolfe Pace and Margaret, had moved to Norfolk where her new husband, Howard, was in the shipbuilding business. But the family business folded and she and Howard went north to New York where he obtained employment building elaborate sets in the "Hippodrome Theatre", including designing and building a rotating stage that permitted horses to pull chariots in the staging of Ben-Hur. Julia herself went on the stage as a singer but after a mishap when they were stranded in Philadelphia because of nonpayment of wages they quit the theatre and returned to Norfolk where Howard learned from an old waterfront character the formula for making rat poison out out of inexpensive chemicals. Soon Howard was exterminating rats in every port from Boston to New Orleans and became very wealthy forming the "Pitts Chemical Corporation" headquartered in New Jersey.
           Howard then bought an old plantation on the James River near Williamsburg and settled down to raise his children, Howard T.Pitts Jr., Addis Pitts, and Margaret Cora Pitts while he ran a Chandlery in Norfolk servicing the large ships that came and went from Norfolk Harbor. One of his employees at the end of World War I was former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Stith Jones Kidd of Norfolk. Stith had the responsibility of going out in a fast motorboat, meeting the incoming vessels, taking their orders for provisions, and scooting back to the warf to have everything ready when the larger vessels docked. When Margaret Cora Pitts, the granddaughter of Henry Randolfe Pace, saw Stith Jones Kidd marriage soon followed.
          As prohibition was in full swing, high paying jobs existed in Boston for experienced  open sea motorboat operators. Stith and Margaret moved to Boston where Jewel Cornelia Kidd was born. Stith died soon after and Jewel was raised on the Pitts, James River Plantation by her grandparents, Virginia and Howard Pitts, and uncles, Howard and Addis.
         When World War II broke out Jewel went to work on an airbase in San Antonio, Texas, where she met and married Army Air Force pilot, Meyer Morris, who was killed a year later in combat with the Germans while serving under General George Patton, leaving Jewel a young widow with an infant son, Tommy Morris. She met and married another pilot, George Finnie Kimble, from Lakeville,  Connecticut. She had 8 children with him, including two sets of twins, one being Jennie Sue Kimble, aka Abigail Storm, or Mrs. Daniel Francis Eggink, who is sole deeded owner of the mineral rights to the Long Island Gold Mine, registered in the Palmyra Court House, Fluvanna County seat. (to be continued..., the story of how Daniel discovered the location of the mine and the records revealing a separate mineral estate with precedence over surface rights, and secured the deeded mineral and water rights for Abigail and her descendants.)

 

All inquiries should be addressed to Abigail Storm.
liberty@woodstocknation.org

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