The Black Sand and Gold Recovery Company

The Black Sand and Gold Recovery Company was an early twentieth-century mining and industrial enterprise based in Chicago, Illinois, organized to extract gold, iron, and other valuable minerals from the black sands of the Pacific Coast.

Incorporated in Arizona with a capital stock of five million dollars, the company was built around the patented Lovett Magnetic Separator, invented by Chicago engineer Thomas J. Lovett, which could separate iron from wet sand and recover metals such as gold, platinum, and zircon. The company was created by Dr. Herbert A. Parkyn a physician and publisher known for his Chicago School of Psychology and as editor of Suggestion magazine, engineer and inventor Thomas J. Lovett, and businessman John H. McFarland. Its board of directors included J. F. Batchelder of the U.S. Government's Lewis and Clark Exposition, William Hoskins industrialist and National Vice President of the American Chemical Society and Henry W. Hoyt of Allis-Chalmers. The Lovett Magnetic Separator was publicly demonstrated in 1905 at the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland, Oregon, where government metallurgists confirmed that the black sands contained large recoverable quantities of gold and iron.

Dr. Parkyn would serve as the fiscal agent and promoted the company widely through his Suggestion magazine and affiliated journals, emphasizing its patented control over the Lovett process and its potential to commercialize the government-verified mineral wealth of the Pacific Coast black sands. Parkyn's use of his magazine as a central marketing tool was part of a wider trend in the emerging New Thought movement of the day, where publications combined teachings on success and mental science with the promotion of business and investment ventures.