Lured by the potential for substantial wealth, Americans have focused a disproportionate share of their industrial effort on extracting and processing resources that are both scarce and in high demand. Gold and silver were always valuable and eagerly sought, but in the nineteenth century, the demand tor other nonferrous metals and (or petroleum rose to unprecedented levels. Obtaining these scarce, nonrenewable resources brought new patterns of industrial land use and new environmental consequences. The continuing effects on our land, water, and air are serious concerns in American society today. The hope of finding gold and silver, the metals of wealth and display, drew numerous adventurers to North America in the seventeenth century. In the East, those hoping to repeat the Spanish experience in South America and Mexico were disappointed. Although colonial prospectors did discover small deposits of nonferrous-metal ores on the east coast and in the Appalachians, most of the metals were not in the precious category. There was a demand for utilitarian metals as well: English colonists depended on lead for pipes, window carries, and shot; they cooked with copper kettles, drank the products of copper stills, and set their tables with pewter (a tin alloy) tableware. Nevertheless, Americans generally found it cheaper and easier to use imported nonferrous metals until the mineral resources of the center of the continent were exploited in the nineteenth century. Iron was the only metal extensively mined in the English colonies. One of the few relicts of pre-Revolutionary nonferrous metallurgy is the Simsbury Copper Mine in East Granby, Connecticut. This mining enterprise obtained its charter in 1706. The state now preserves the site, not as an industrial monument but because the mine served for a time as the state prison. Visitors can enter the underground workings. Physical evidence of the first gold discovery in the United States, in 1799, exists at the Reed Gold Mine, a state historic site near Georgiaville, North Carolina. Most of the milling survivals are from later development at the mining site in 1854 and 1896. North Carolina led the nation in gold production until the California gold rush of 1849.