The Etowah River cutting through Lumpkin County hosted numerous placer bars and lode prospects that miners pursued from the 1830s onward. In the early 1930s a syndicate known as the Etowah Gold and Power Company attempted an ambitious plan: hand‑driving a diversion tunnel to reroute the river so crews could work the exposed channel for gold. Contemporary accounts describe about fifty laborers completing the tunnel and damming the stream to strip bedrock—one of several Depression‑era efforts to revive Georgia’s gold industry. Elsewhere along the river, earlier claims known collectively as the Etowah Mine targeted quartz veins on adjoining lots. Although none of these ventures became long‑term successes, the Etowah projects capture the ingenuity miners brought to the region’s complex geology and the enduring hope that another rich pocket lay just around the bend.