Back in the late nineteenth century, asbestos mining allowed a new source of jobs and income in a remote region of Georgia where most citizens were farmers and lumbermen. Around about 1890, mineral prospectors found about six asbestos laden veins of ore-rich rock on Sal Mountain, just south of Sautee and ten miles northeast of Cleveland, GA.
The very hard asbestos mining labor was done by the local men of White County. At peak mining, the mine companies were shipping as much as twenty-five tons of asbestos rich rock each day. The region had few good roads and was hard to reach, they had to horse wagon fright it to Clarkesville, where it was loaded on the freight trains and shipped north for processing.
Mining the asbestos rich rock is not a problem; it is the dirty milling process. The asbestos embedded rock is not dangerous until you grind and smash it up to a fine powder with ball crusher grinders.
Georgia citizens that lived near old asbestos mines, even if there is still plenty of the asbestos rock in the ground, have nothing to worry about.