There was a gold strike in North Carolina in 1799 that resulted in a gold rush and placer mining. A more important discovery occurred in the North Georgia Mountains following a discovery in 1828. The Georgia mines were productive for over a decade, but they started to decline in the 1840s, so when the California strike occurred in 1848, the Gold Rush to the West, the following year, was well timed to attract experienced gold miners who had worked in the South. Other Georgia gold miners played roles in discoveries and mine development in Colorado and Montana.

Gold mining continued in Georgia, on a smaller scale, through the early twentieth century.

To expand on /u/itsallfolklore's answer, two of the first three branch US Mints were established in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Dahlonega, Georgia, to locally refine the gold ore and strike legal tender gold coins. (unhappy trivia: The gold discovery in Georgia was on Cherokee treaty lands. This didn't stop President Andrew Jackson from sending them to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, so white men could dig up the gold.)

It was considered too dangerous to regularly ship gold bars from the wilds of the North Carolina and Georgia gold fields to Philadelphia, though some "standard purity" ingots (90% gold, with a 10% blend of copper and silver) were shipped to Philadelphia for use in minting gold coins there.

The coin presses at both Charlotte and Dahlonega were so weak, that the largest gold coin produced at either mint was the 8.38-gram $5 half eagle. At this time, the $10 eagle was the country's largest denomination coin. After the authorization for the gold $1 coin and the $20 double eagle, Charlotte and Dahlonega began minting the dollar in addition to the $2.50 quarter eagle and half eagle

The two mints functioned more as assay offices than mints, though the Mint System allowed anyone to bring gold to any Mint to be refined and struck into whichever coins desired, for a fee.

Both were permanently shut down at the start of the Civil War, after the Confederate government minted all the gold on-hand into desperately needed hard money.

The New Orleans Mint, which was a full-sized mint authorized at the same time as Charlotte and Dahlonega, and also fell to the Confederacy in 1861, was not reopened until 1879, and that only because a new law forced the Treasury Department to strike millions of silver dollars a month.