BELLVILLE — Brock Mensching held an army green prospecting pan, swishing the muddy water in slow, deliberate circles.
Pebbles from the river slid through the riffles, but he was watching the center of the pan, hoping to spot a fleck of gold among the grains of black sand.
For more than two decades, Gold Rush Days has drawn prospecting experts, enthusiasts and beginners together along the banks of the Clear Fork River. The annual event is hosted by the Ohio Buckeye Chapter of the Gold Prospectors Association of America.
Mensching attended the event Saturday with his parents, Travis and Kristin. They called prospecting a fun, family-friendly activity for the outdoors.
Russ Victor and his wife Tammy called it a way of life.
“The first time I saw Gold Fever on TV, I was hooked,” Russ said.
Victor said he still gets goosebumps thinking about the first speck of gold he found, panning a bag of prospecting dirt in his kitchen sink. Since then, he’s traveled the American East looking for gold.
Geologists believe the tiny deposits of gold found in Ohio originated in the igneous rocks of Canadian Shield and were carried south by moving glaciers.
The precious metal is not as abundant in Ohio as other states. When it’s found, it’s often in quantities of just a few grams or less. Sometimes it’s just a speck, or as prospectors call it, “flour gold.”
Victor was among those searching for flour gold Saturday as part of the common dig. Prospectors stood on either side of a “long Tom” sluice — a long, narrow box used for separating gold from gravel. Some dumped buckets of rocky river soil into the top. Others shuffled the rocks back and forth under a steady stream of water, pumped up from the Clear Fork.
A grate near the bottom of the sluice drains water through to a lower level, where it rushes down the sloped box in a muddy stream, depositing only the heaviest bits of sediment into the ridges of the rubber mat below.
“There’s little ridges in the carpeting and it creates a turbulence, a little low pressure zone and as the water slows down, the heavy stuff falls into it,” explained Pat O’Masters, activities director with the GPAA’s Ohio Buckeye Chapter.
This traditional method of prospecting takes advantage of gold’s natural density, which makes it heavier than the average river rock. But it still takes a precise setup to reap results.
“You have to have the right flow, the right angle, rate of flow,” said Robert Kreiling, a 15-year member of the Buckeye chapter.
“If it’s too fast, a lot of the gold will wash out. If it’s too slow, you’ll get clog outs.”
Gold isn’t the only thing prospectors have found in the Clear Fork. It’s common to discover fragments of garnet. O’Masters has vials full of it at home, but his favorite treasure is an 1848 large cent, a rare collectible coin he saw immersed in the watery gravel.
While perhaps the most famous gold rush took place in California in 1849, Bellville experienced its own wave of treasurer hunters after a local doctor found nuggets along Dead Man’s Run in 1850.
To date, there are no reports of anyone finding enough gold in the area to turn a hefty profit.
So while it’s possible to find gold flowing through the Clear Fork, it’s unlikely anyone will get rich doing so.
“This isn’t about money. You loose money doing this,” Victor said.
“It’s the clean living, the honest living, the camaraderie. You run into people you don’t even know and they’ll talk to you for hours.”
O’Masters agreed.
“The real gold is not in the creak. It’s right here,” he said. “This is the real gold — all the people, the friends and family gathered around.”
