ATLANTA

A party of prospectors who crossed the Sawtooth Mountain Range into the middle fork of the Boise River found gold in the Atlanta area in 1863. This is how the Washington Statesman newspaper of Walla Walla described those days after the first discovery:

"We have had quite an excitement about the new diggings on the Middle Fork of the Boise, about 100 miles from here. Hundreds of miners have left on the report that the mines yield from 10 to 50 cents to the pan."

Before long Atlanta became another of Idaho's early gold camps to be established during the Civil War. In fact, according to historians the town was named in honor of the famous battle of Atlanta that had recently taken place. However, the Confederate sympathizers who named the town mistakenly thought the South's General Hood had won the battle, when in fact Union General Sherman was the victor. Though the truth eventually became known the name Atlanta stuck.

As had been the case in other areas, the placer gold didn't last long. Then the discovery of a huge ledge of gold brightened the prospects for the mining district. A number of tunnels and shafts were burrowed out to get at the rich ore but the extremely remote location of the town made it difficult to construct large stamp mills. And though mills were in operation by 1867 they weren't ideal for recovering the gold and silver found in Atlanta. As much as three-fourths of the value of the ore was lost in the milling process, including all the silver and most of the gold.

So despite rich ore, the isolation and milling problems impeded Atlanta's development as a mining district. In 1878 a road built from Rocky Bar to Atlanta helped ease transportation problems but it really wasn't until new processes were put in place in the early 1930s that large-scale mining was truly successful in Atlanta. In fact it was so successful the Atlanta mining district became the leader in Idaho gold production from 1932 to 1936. So even though a variety of mining activities had already taken place over almost seventy years, most of the more than sixteen million dollars in gold taken out of Atlanta occurred after 1932.

Today, Atlanta is a quaint community that serves as a supply stop and staging area for visitors to the Boise National Forest and the Sawtooth National Recreation area.