There is a pot of gold and cask of brandy hidden somewhere in the laurel crowned hills hereabouts. For over a hundred and fifty years folks have been trying to unearth this golden cache, but it has proved to be just as elusive as the proverbial treasure and the end of the rainbow.
Phillip Gillespie, a rifle making man from a rifle making clan, buried the gold and brandy in an underground vault back in 1862 and then went off to fight in a war that swallowed him up.
The spot he picked to hide his fortune was a secret he held unto himself and the secret died with him on some unknown battlefield far from the hills of home. It is locked in the ancient earth of Forge Mountain which stands like a grim prophecy.
The land has not changed much since Phillip Gillespie buried his gold and his brandy. It is essentially the same. And a soil that cannot be plowed under keeps it secrets. Be that as it may, folks keep on searching because there is something a treasure that fastens upon a man’s mind. But, then, these are folks who never knew Phillip Gillespie or his intentions.
When he decided to offer his rifle gun and his trigger finger to the Confederacy, he told a bunch of mountain men gathered at his gun shop. “I aim to make certain no man ever spends my money or any red-legged revenuer ever lays eyes on my brandy.” And then proceeded to do just that.
The Gillespies had come out of Pennsylvania, out of Lancaster, where the patriarch of the clan had established a reputation as a famous gunsmith. A pioneering son named Matthew followed Daniel Boone down into the wilds of the Blue Ridge and then came to the Smoky Mountains where he set up a gunshop near Phillip Sitton’s iron works under the dark shadow of Forge Mountain.
He married one of Sitton’s daughters. She gave him three sons. They became gunsmiths, too, and shaped the guns kelps hammered out by their grandfather. They added luster to the Gillespie name which already was synonymous with rifle gun wherever frontiersmen gambled their lives on the trigger finds.
One of the sons was Phillip. By the time he was 20; his gun-craft had earned himself a right smart fortune and made him a man of property. Between his gunshop, which produced prime rifles, and his apple orchard which produced a right peart brandy by way of a homemade distillery, the gold coins literally poured in and Phillip Gillespie stashed them away in a leather poke.
Taking a cue from his Scotch-Irish ancestors, he believed that any man had the inherent right to make and sell brandy, law or no law, and the fruits of a man’s labors should not be taxed. He never had paid out any of his gold coins in tax on the brandy he made and he didn’t ever aim to as long as he lived. By the time the Civil War came on, Phillip Gillespie had succeeded in keeping to his aim without too much trouble with revenuers.
He was still a young man when old Edmund Ruffin hauled off and fired the shot that started the Civil War down at Fort Sumter. News travelled slowly back in those days and it was some time before folks hereabouts realized what was happening. And when they did hear, it did not mean much. But, in time, the war became a real thing to them.
It wasn’t long until every set of powder irons in the entire area had been pressed into use. Many of the local farms were producing charcoal and saltpeter for gunpowder. By and by, the summons for enlistment in the Confederate Army reached these parts. Guns were polished and grease boxes filled. Powder horns were fitted with new leather straps. Bullet ladles and bullet molds lay side by side with the stout shot bag of linsey-woolsey.
Everything was ready for an early morning start. But Phillip Gillespie had one more task to perform before he left for the fighting. It concerned his poke of gold coins, which now held a fortune of some $1600 and 50 gallons of brandy. The gold mostly was Bechler coins, minted down at Rutherfordton. The brandy was in a stout barrel which a neighboring cooper had fashioned of oak staves and tied with hoops of tough young hickory saplings. It was built to endure.
“No, sir” Phillip Gillespie mused. “They’ll never find my brandy and collect any part of my hard earned gold for tax.”
So when night came on, he slipped out of the house with his poke of gold coins tightly packed in an earthen crock he had taken from his mother’s spring house.
He moved off to the barn and hitched one of the oxen to a sled. He rolled his cask of brandy from its hiding place under some straw and loaded in on the sled. Then he set out for grim Forge Mountain. He had a pick and shovel with him, and he carried a rifle gun.
Somewhere in a cove up there, Phillip Gillespie halted his ox and sled and dug an underground safety vault. He lined it with rock and built it to last and preserve his treasure. Finally he placed the gold and the brandy in the vault. He sealed the cache with more stones and then packed earth over it. And over the newly turned earth he spread leaves and brush to hide all trace of the thing he had done. Satisfied with his handiwork, he turned toward home.
“I’ve hid it good” he told his folks. “Won’t nobody find it. It’ll be there when I get back.”
The following morning, Phillip Gillespie said goodbye to his folks and marched off to war with his long rifle in the crook of his arm, a rifle gun he had made with his own hands in his own gunshop.
News of the war’s progress trickled into the isolated settlements of the Smoky Mountains and the news was not good, for the new was not of battles lost but of men of the settlements killed.
It came stark and terse…Killed at Seven Pines…Missing at Malvern Hills…Died of wounds received at Chancellorsville…a roll call of home boys dwindling.
Stragglers and deserters roamed the country, plundering and pilfering. Old man Phillip Sitton was shot by a renegade as he stood in the doorway of his home.
The war went on and there was no word of Phillip Gillespie. Then the war was over and those who had survived began straggling back. They waited for Phillip Gillespie, but he never did come back.
Folks remembered his talking of hiding his gold and his brandy. So they started searching for the golden cache. They’ve been looking for it a long time now. It’s become a legend and a tale to tell around the fire. But the gold and brandy are still there. For Phillip Gillespie said he aimed to make certain that no man ever spent his gold or any revenuer ever eyes on his brandy!