THE SCREAMS ring out with some regularity on weekends at Lake Anna State Park in southern Spotsylvania County.

Seeing the shine of gold will do that to you, especially if you happen to be panning for that precious metal when the sunlight catches them just right.

"Someone will see a tiny gold flake and yell," said Josh Young, a summer employee who gives tours of the old Goodwin Gold Mine at the park and conducts the Saturday afternoon gold-panning demonstration. "It gets everybody doing the panning excited."

But Young, a student at Germanna Community College, said the thing most soon learn is that the bright spots of gold are really just flashes in the pan.

"It's hard to find pieces of any size," he said.

Until a regional State Parks spokeswoman pointed it out to me recently, I had no clue that the state park in Spotsylvania contains what was once the site of a busy gold mine.

When you visit the mine--done on weekends and some holidays by making a reservation with the park for the gold-panning and/or the guided mine tour--there's not a lot to see right now.

There are several informative panels and diagrams of what a mine on the site might have included, and descriptions of the various types of machines that could have been used to separate gold from the tons of ore-bearing material that was processed.

One notes the region's proud history of gold-mining, including the fact that Virginia was the third-largest gold-producing state from 1830 until 1850, sending $1.5 millions worth of gold to the U.S. Mint.

As summer employee Candace Garnett has told many a visitor on the gold-mine tour, there were 170 mines in operation in Virginia in a 100-year period starting in 1832 with the incorporation of the Virginia Gold Mining Co. of New York, which began operations in Orange County.