Explore Alabama Treasure Stories:

Alabama Gold Mines

Bog Hole Treasure. Toward the end of the Civil War in 1865, one story tells that a wealthy planter named Charles Hansen was traveling with two Confederate soldiers in disguise on a treasure wagon full of $100,000 in gold and silver bound for General Hood in Columbia, Tennessee when the wagon became stuck in a bog hole about 4 miles north of Athens, Alabama in Limestone County, and 1/2 mile from a major stream crossing (which might have been near Williams Spring).  While they were struggling to free the wagon, Union scouts arrived and a gun battle ensued, during which the Confederate soldiers tossed two metal chests containing the treasure into the bog rather than let it fall into Union hands.  Hansen escaped and fled to the home of a fellow planter, intending to return, but when he did he encountered another Union patrol and was killed.  The area was searched, but it is believed that no one was ever able to relocate the treasure.

Lost Gold of Keel Mountain

Sivley Treasure of Madison County

Spanish Gold Bars at Old Bay Minette. Shortly after the American Revolution and Spain's establishment in 1780 of the Spanish Fort at the old site of Bay Minette which was on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay at the time, some Spaniards were transporting a large number of gold bars when they realized they were being pursued by a large party of hostile Indians.  They knew they had to move quickly as the Indians appeared to be preparing to ambush, and as hauling the heavy gold bars was slowing them down, they decided to try to bury the treasure and escape while they could.  Some were able to flee to safety while others lost their lives, and due to confusion among the survivors regarding the location of the buried treasure, it was never recovered.  

The Pot of Gold Nuggets.  In the early 1900's a Cherokee Indian who had been forced to leave his land returned from Oklahoma to search for a pot of gold nuggets his ancestors had buried in 1836.  He searched the farm owned at the time by Shelby Cullom bordering the Flint River about 2 miles north of Ryland at the northeast edge of Huntsville near the Bell Factory area in Madison County.  As the land had changed and did not match the description, he failed to find the gold.  

Welcome to Sweet Home Alabama, the Heart of Dixie, where the Mardi Gras was first introduced to the Western world in 1704 as Boeuf Gras.  Hank Aaron, Helen Keller, Jesse Owens, Nat King Cole, and many other famous Americans called Alabama their home.

Indians still inhabited most of the present-day Alabama when war broke out in 1813 between American settlers and a Creek faction known as the Red Sticks, who resisted white encroachment.  After General Andrew Jackson and his Tennessee militia defeated  the Red Sticks in 1814 at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, the Creek were forced to cede 40,000 square miles of land to the U.S., thereby opening most of the state to white settlement. Pioneers, caught up in "Alabama fever," poured in from the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky into what Andrew Jackson called "the best unsettled country in America."  Wealthy migrants came in covered wagons, and ambitious farmers moved to the newly opened area in hopes of acquiring fertile land on which to grow cotton, as cotton's profitability had increased dramatically after the invention of the cotton gin.  The world's first electric trolley system was born in Montgomery, Alabama, which is also the birthplace of the Confederate States of America, and Moundville near Tuscaloosa is one of the most important Mound Builder sites in the southeastern United States.  It includes twenty "platform mounds" for Indian buildings, dating from 1200 to 1500.