In 1942, Washington Shut Down America's Gold Mines. The Gold Is Still Down There.

One of the richest mines in America has been silent for about 70 years. A tiny company owns all of it now, and gold is more than 100 times the price it was when the lights went out.

On October 8, 1942, the War Production Board issued Order L-208. It told America's gold mines to stop producing. The war needed miners for copper, and gold wasn't going to win it.

Mining towns across the West went quiet almost overnight. One of the mines forced to shut down was, at the time, the second-largest lode gold producer in the United States.

After the war, most gold mines never came back. The math didn't work anymore. Gold was fixed by law at $35 an ounce, while wages and equipment had gotten a lot more expensive. This one tried. It reopened, fought rising costs for about a decade, and closed for good in the mid-1950s. The gold stayed right where it was.

It hasn't produced an ounce in about 70 years.

And this was never a marginal mine. Over its life it produced about 2.4 million ounces of gold at an average grade of roughly half an ounce per ton. That's several times richer than the ore most underground gold mines work today.

Now run the numbers on what's already come out of it. At today's gold price, those 2.4 million ounces would be worth more than $9.6 billion.

The company that owns this mine is valued at under $20 million. That works out to about a fifth of a penny for every dollar of gold the mine has already produced.

That gold is long gone, of course. Nobody knows yet how much the old-timers left down there when they sealed it up. If the drills find even a tenth of what came out before, you'd be looking at roughly $960 million worth of gold sitting under a company priced at $20 million.

A small company now owns the whole thing outright, about 109 acres of surface land plus 2,560 acres of mineral rights underneath. This summer it started drilling again, eight deep holes aimed at both gold and tungsten. Tungsten matters because the U.S. military depends on it and China produces most of the world's supply. This mine has produced it before. So a gold find could come with a second story Washington cares about.

Shares trade for pennies. When a stock is priced that low, one strong drill result can move it more than a year of good news moves a big miner.

Small miners with this kind of setup tend to stay quiet until the drill results and the headlines start stacking up. We'd rather you hear about it before that happens.