For more than a century, Coker Creek was the economic center of Tennessee’s eastern gold district. Prospectors began working the area as early as 1827, when it was still within the Cherokee Nation. Tennessee’s first state geologist, Gerard Troost, visited Coker Creek in 1831 and found hundreds of miners engaged in washing materials from rivulets, gulleys, and other low places. Over the decades, prospectors, local farmers, and several mining companies used panning, hydraulic hoses, mechanical dredges, blasting, and tunneling in their search for gold around Coker Creek. A few individuals made fortunes, but most realized only a modest return. Local gold mining peaked from 1856 to 1860, when 600 to 700 prospectors, including several slaves and freedmen, worked the streams and uplands in the Coker Creek vicinity. Official U.S. Mint tallies document that no more than $269,422 in gold was retrieved between 1831 and 1921, although early merchants who traded goods for gold estimated recovery at approximately $2,000,000 by the 1890s.