JewelFreak
Ideal_Rock
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- Sep 3, 2009
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The N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh will unveil today a dazzling treasure from Alexander County: a collection of rare and remarkably large emeralds.
An anonymous donor has given the museum one of the biggest prizes in its 132-year history – a collection of emeralds that were unearthed in North Carolina. Their value, in the millions, makes the gift among the museum’s largest.
The stones, along with another rare mineral called hiddenite, will be housed in the museum’s new wing, the $56 million Nature Research Center that opens next month.
The collection has three big uncut emeralds. One weighs 1,225 carats and measures nearly 4 inches long. The fourth, known as the “Carolina Emperor,” is 64.38 carats, the largest cut emerald originating from North America. It mimics the cut and size of an emerald that belonged to Catherine the Great, empress of Russia in the 18th century. Her diamond-and-emerald brooch sold for $1.65 million at auction in 2010.
Two mines in Hiddenite, a small town in Alexander County, are the source of most North Carolina emeralds. The stones are typically snapped up by big-name jewelers such as Tiffany’s or the Houston Museum of Natural Science, which bills itself as the home of the world’s finest mineral collection.
But an unnamed donor, presumably a North Carolinian, wanted to keep some of the state’s precious jewels here. Late last summer, Bennett got a call from the donor, who invited her to lunch. “After lunch we went into an office, a cardboard box showed up on the table,” she said. “They started unwrapping things in the cardboard box.”
First there were pieces of hiddenite, an unusual light green mineral. Then the “Carolina Emperor.” Then the three uncut stones, each one grander than the one before.
The Adams farm, a 100-acre tract in Alexander County, is where Terry Ledford, a lifelong gem hunter, found them. Ledford mines the area in partnership with W.R. Adams, whose family owns the property. It’s a painstaking process that may take years to yield a major find.
Ledford looks for clues – bits of mica and quartz – when picking a spot to dig. He goes at least 3 feet down, below the topsoil, to look for veins of minerals. Then he follows the veins deeper as they widen, hoping to hit a pocket where emeralds, hiddenite and other minerals might lurk.
There, he abandons all metal tools so as not to scratch anything valuable. He uses wooden tools, mostly bamboo and occasionally chopsticks.
In 2009, he located a big nugget of something that became the “Carolina Emperor.”
“It was so dark. I said to myself, there’s no way that could be what I think it is,” he said. “The more I dug around it, the bigger it got.”
Eventually, he extracted it. He hollered up to Adams, who is in his 90s, sitting at the top of a hill nearby. “I said, ‘Get ready, I’ve got something that’s going to change our lives, I think.’ ”
They ran it up to the house, where they scrubbed away clay with a toothbrush. It gleamed like a 7Up bottle.
Last year, Ledford continued to dig on the property in an old hole long abandoned. Close to 20 feet down, he hit the mother lode: three gigantic emeralds. The first was so large, he didn’t think it was an emerald, until he held it up to the sunlight. “That’s when the praying, and the thanking the good Lord and the whooping and the hollering started.”
An anonymous donor has given the museum one of the biggest prizes in its 132-year history – a collection of emeralds that were unearthed in North Carolina. Their value, in the millions, makes the gift among the museum’s largest.
The stones, along with another rare mineral called hiddenite, will be housed in the museum’s new wing, the $56 million Nature Research Center that opens next month.
The collection has three big uncut emeralds. One weighs 1,225 carats and measures nearly 4 inches long. The fourth, known as the “Carolina Emperor,” is 64.38 carats, the largest cut emerald originating from North America. It mimics the cut and size of an emerald that belonged to Catherine the Great, empress of Russia in the 18th century. Her diamond-and-emerald brooch sold for $1.65 million at auction in 2010.
Two mines in Hiddenite, a small town in Alexander County, are the source of most North Carolina emeralds. The stones are typically snapped up by big-name jewelers such as Tiffany’s or the Houston Museum of Natural Science, which bills itself as the home of the world’s finest mineral collection.
But an unnamed donor, presumably a North Carolinian, wanted to keep some of the state’s precious jewels here. Late last summer, Bennett got a call from the donor, who invited her to lunch. “After lunch we went into an office, a cardboard box showed up on the table,” she said. “They started unwrapping things in the cardboard box.”
First there were pieces of hiddenite, an unusual light green mineral. Then the “Carolina Emperor.” Then the three uncut stones, each one grander than the one before.
The Adams farm, a 100-acre tract in Alexander County, is where Terry Ledford, a lifelong gem hunter, found them. Ledford mines the area in partnership with W.R. Adams, whose family owns the property. It’s a painstaking process that may take years to yield a major find.
Ledford looks for clues – bits of mica and quartz – when picking a spot to dig. He goes at least 3 feet down, below the topsoil, to look for veins of minerals. Then he follows the veins deeper as they widen, hoping to hit a pocket where emeralds, hiddenite and other minerals might lurk.
There, he abandons all metal tools so as not to scratch anything valuable. He uses wooden tools, mostly bamboo and occasionally chopsticks.
In 2009, he located a big nugget of something that became the “Carolina Emperor.”
“It was so dark. I said to myself, there’s no way that could be what I think it is,” he said. “The more I dug around it, the bigger it got.”
Eventually, he extracted it. He hollered up to Adams, who is in his 90s, sitting at the top of a hill nearby. “I said, ‘Get ready, I’ve got something that’s going to change our lives, I think.’ ”
They ran it up to the house, where they scrubbed away clay with a toothbrush. It gleamed like a 7Up bottle.
Last year, Ledford continued to dig on the property in an old hole long abandoned. Close to 20 feet down, he hit the mother lode: three gigantic emeralds. The first was so large, he didn’t think it was an emerald, until he held it up to the sunlight. “That’s when the praying, and the thanking the good Lord and the whooping and the hollering started.”
You never know what mother nature will show you from time-to-time...
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