Gold rushes in Cleburne and Tallapoosa Counties attracted thousands of miners years before California's famous strike. In 1936, production at the Hog Mountain mine caused Alabama to be recognized as the top producer in the Appalachian states. In Hog Mountain's heyday, a local German settler discovered the precious metal while digging a wine cellar. In Log Pit, unscrupulous speculators "shot" ore into rock crevices and "salted" nuggets on land to enhance its sale value. A Cleburne County miner cleaned over eleven pounds of gold and was killed in a "free fight" all in one day. Join author Peggy Jackson Walls as she traces a century of gold mining in Alabama. "The really appealing factor in this book is the uniqueness of its content, supplementing any existing library on rockets of the 1960s and adding especially useful information. The author has done a magnificent job condensing a lot of information in the expanded captions and that makes it especially useful." Space Flight Magazine Walls began her research with the miners of the 1930s, many of who were connected to her family. The second half of Alabama Gold is full of interviews in which these miners tell their stories. Walls felt that sharing the harsh realities of life in this little-known period of Alabama history was a job that was meant for her. Lake Martin Living Walls' interest in Hog Mountain and in gold mining in Tallapoosa County has resulted in "Alabama Gold: A History of the South's Last Mother Load," a 175-page book release earlier this month by The History Press. The book spans a century of gold mining in Alabama, the last southern Piedmont state in which gold was discovered. alexcityoutlook.com Peggy Jackson Walls earned her bachelor of science degree in secondary education at Auburn University in Montgomery and her master of arts in liberal arts, with a minor in southern history at the Auburn campus. She has taught at Auburn University, Benjamin Russell High School, Central Alabama Community College and the University of Phoenix online. Her article "Gold Mining at Hog Mountain in the 1930s" was published by the Alabama Review in July 1984. In 1998, she interviewed and wrote the script for a two-hour documentary, Alexander City: 125 Years of Memories. She has published articles, poetry and interviews in different mediums.Her research has been cited in Pulitzer Prize--nominated books Poor but Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites  (2001) and Alabama: A History of a Deep South State (2010). She is coauthor of Alexander City from Arcadia Publishing's Images of America series (2011) and was published in the anthology Chinaberries and Magnolia Blossoms from Solomon & George Publishers (2012).