The Lost Chestnut Creek Silver Mine
An installment in our Folklore & Legends series
The banks of Chestnut Creek have a way of rearranging themselves when no one’s looking. One year, the bed is gravel. Next, it’s mud and willow roots. Paths vanish. Stones shift. Try to mark a spot on the map, and nature will soon erase it. Maybe that’s why no one else ever found the Chestnut Creek silver mine.
But the story? That sticks around.
Long before Galax became a city, before it had a fiddlers’ convention and a Walmart, the town was just a scattered patchwork of farms and shops. Folks made do with what they had, and some made a little more than they were supposed to. That’s where the legend begins: two blacksmith brothers, a hidden vein of silver, and a nighttime trade in counterfeit coins.
They say the brothers worked out of a shop near what is now Glendale Road, not far from Wolf Glade. By day, they were blacksmiths; honest work, if repetitive. Horseshoes, bells, gate latches, and plow repairs. By all accounts, they were skilled and charged fair prices. Smithing wasn’t the kind of work where a man could get rich. But at night, the story goes, they changed hats.
Discovery of the Chestnut Creek Silver Mine
Somewhere near where Bedsaul Branch empties into Chestnut Creek, they found a silver seam buried in the ridges. It wasn’t a proper mine, not with timbers and lanterns and tracks. Just a seam of raw material that they worked quietly and carefully. They hauled the ore in buckskin sacks under the cover of night. Back in their smithy, they melted it down, poured it into hand-carved molds, and minted silver coins so close to the real thing it took an expert to tell the difference.
Come morning, the molds were hidden, the ashes swept, and the brothers went back to smithing.
It wasn’t greed so much as cunning. Maybe a bit of boredom. Maybe the thrill of outsmarting the system. Whatever their reasons, they kept it quiet. Too quiet, maybe. Because at some point, someone started asking questions.
The details become murky from here, as they often do in stories passed down from memory. Questions arose. Rumors spread. Government men came sniffing around.
The brothers got wind of it, just in time. One night, they buried their molds for good, packed up whatever coins they hadn’t spent, and vanished. No forwarding address. No names in the courthouse ledger. No record of arrest. Just the rumor of a Chestnut Creek silver mine, and the occasional tale of someone who tried to find it.
The Mine Becomes Legend
Most who search don’t get far. The terrain doesn’t help. Bedsaul Branch wanders like a drunken mule, never quite headed where you think it’s going, and liable to change its mind halfway. Floods shift the banks. Trees fall and block old trails. Even longtime locals lose their bearings once they’re off the road. You can get turned around quickly if you’re chasing ghosts and silver.
Still, every few years, somebody goes looking for the Chestnut Creek silver mine. A boy with a metal detector. A retiree with too much time and an out-of-date topo map. A treasure-hunting YouTuber with a drone. They poke around near the confluence of the branch and the creek. They dig. They speculate. They swear they’re close.
They never are.
What’s funny is that the current value of the Chestnut Creek silver mine story likely exceeds that of the coins themselves. If someone were to find that mine (if it even existed), they’d pull up rocks and clay and maybe a few tarnished slugs. But they’d lose something in the process. The thrill. The mystery. The way mountain towns like Galax keep their legends just out of reach.
There’s a kind of genius in what those blacksmiths pulled off, if it’s true. They weren’t greedy outlaws or desperadoes. They didn’t rob banks or shoot their way out of town. They used what they had: fire, metal, skill, and the cover of night. They made something out of nothing. They made trouble beautiful.
And then they disappeared.
This counterfeit 1885 Morgan silver dollar is of the type minted by the blacksmiths (for reference only).
People now think of Galax as a music town. They come for the fiddles, the flatfooting, and the fried apple pies. But it’s also a place where stories run as deep as the creek beds. Some are true. Some want to be true. Some are still waiting to be found under a blanket of moss and gravel, just downstream from where the silver used to run.
If you’re lucky, you might find one.
But don’t expect it to sit still for you.
More Appalachian Folklore
See more mountain legends, local tales, and story traditions on the Folklore page.
Appalachian Folklore and Legends Collection
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