After a 17-pound gold nugget was found in 1799 on the Reed farm east of Charlotte, the search for gold spread across North Carolina. By the 1820's, thousands of prospectors had arrived to seek their fortunes in the streams and rivers of the piedmont and foothills, land prices soared, and shanty towns sprang up overnight. Much of the mining was placer mining in gravels along streams and rivers, work that could be done with a shovel and pan or sometimes a simple rocker, while itinerant miners worked for a percentage of their findings, local farmers panned for gold during the off-season, and some plantation owners shifted workers from cotton fields to gold fields. In the Rutherfordton region, most mining was placer mining under and around rivers and tributaries, while closer to Charlotte miners followed gold veins deep underground. During this first gold rush, the German Christopher Bechtler, born in 1782 near Pforzheim, came to North Carolina after developing a long-standing passion for gold and an interest in mining, and within a year of his arrival in the United States he had reached Rutherford County, purchased land, and begun searching for gold. A clockmaker, jeweler, and inventor, he fit the wave of European mining talent being recruited by North Carolina companies in the 1820's, and in Germany he had already obtained an 1819 permit giving him six years of exclusive use of his gold-washing machine.