In 1819, the first gold mine appeared in the Nevyansk area. A few years later, there were already 19 mines, and about 2,000 people worked there. Gold mining in the 19th century made up a quarter of the total revenue of the Nevyansk mining district. At the Nevyansk plant, they even created a gold-mining office that dealt with this new industry. For the extraction of gold, both simple rocker boxes and huge gold-mining machines were used.

Both large prospecting groups and small associations of 4–6 individuals were engaged in gold mining. In total, this industry employed roughly 1,500 people. For comparison: in 1860, the Nevyansk plant had 5,500 employees, of whom slightly more than 2,000 were employed for the core activities.

For washing, a simple structure was used: a rocker box, which was rather light and easy to carry. Gold-bearing sand was poured onto a cast-iron sieve, which was located on the upper platform of the rocker box, and then water from the stream was poured through the sluice into a wooden box with holes. Washers with shovels mixed and crushed soil, lumps of sand, earth and clay. After washing, the waste rock was washed out, while the gold-containing concentrate and the nuggets remained on the steps of the rocker box wooden tail. To better retain the concentrate, these steps were lined with washed roots. Then the prospectors collected the accumulated concentrate in an iron basin and cleaned the gold by hand with a ladle, carefully washing away the entire layer of quartz sand.

The discovery of Nevyansk gold is surrounded by legends. One of them was told by the famous scientist and academician Peter Simon Pallas, who traveled the Urals in the 1770s. He wrote that ‘near Nevyansk, in a burnt stump on a field, a raskolnik [religious dissenter] found a piece of gold weighing one pound and twelve zolotniks (this is about 500 grams), and gave it to the Yekaterinburg chancellery.’ Other authors also mention the name of this raskolnik: Aleksey Fyodorov. There were rumors that he was imprisoned by order of the Demidovs, so as not to draw attention to the Nevyansk mines.

According to archive documents, ‘ore stones, similar to gold ore’ were first discovered in the vicinity of Nevyansk in the 1760s by the peasants Savva Tretyakov and Semyon Sivkov. The Mining Chancellery rewarded the gold miners ‘for mining ores’, freeing them from duties and giving them 50 roubles.