Can You Find Gems In North Carolina？ ｜ Free Documentary

As a boy I found clear quartz crystals and purple amethysts. At the same place you can also find rich red rubies and pink and red garnets. You may even find incredible blue sapphires and emeralds from pale green to the deepest green. At my secret place you can find gold nuggets and even diamonds. There you can find just about all the colors of the earth. I'm not talking about the colors of spring, summer or fall in coastal swamps, Piedmont forest or in the mountains. I'm talking about the colors of the earth. Not those growing on the surface of the earth but those that come from deep within the earth. To understand the origin of various gems and minerals we must first look at the ingredients and the recipe used to create the corner of the earth we know today as North Carolina. To get a history of the formative years of this state there is no better source than Chris Tacker, Curator of Geology of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. A brief history of North Carolina geology. Things start with the collision of North America and South America and formation of the basement rocks in the western part of the Blue Ridge. When North America and South America tore apart, sediments off of those mountains filled in the gap. You see those sediments now shoved back up into the mountains around Clingman's Dome and Grandfather Mountain. After that it's just a series of collisions. The suspect terrains collide, the exotic terrains collide, then Africa collides. And once Africa collides that's the last and greatest stage of mountain building in the Appalachians. But with each collision you get more thrust faulting where rocks out here get shortened and pushed up, something like this. So with each collision the mountains grow taller. I've heard estimates in scientific talks that they were as high as the Andes, which is certainly likely. But all of these collisions were over with by 265 million years ago and the mountains have been weathering ever since. As soon as the mountains were created, the forces of erosion began to tear them down. Nature's tools included wind and water. Ice caused cracks to form and pieces to chip away. Lichens and mosses widened the cracks and began to break down stone into soil. Bigger cracks in soil became home to trees and shrubs that could split apart the largest rocks over time. Stone fields near Grandfather Mountain bear witness to nature's power as sculptor of the Appalachians we see today. To better understand our present landscape, I asked Chris to explain the diverse nature of North Carolina's terrain. North Carolina has an incredible biological diversity because of the large number of habitats that are available. All of these different habitats are rooted in the local geology. North Carolina also has an incredible mineral diversity that's also rooted in the local geology. North Carolina is made up of a large number of different geologic pieces like a quilt or a collage. Well, you can cut North Carolina into three different pieces if you exclude the coastal plain. In the western part of the state is what might be called original North America or ancestral North America. It was the edge of the continent about 500 million years ago. Everything to the east of that has been added to the continent in the last 500 million years. Now between the eastern Blue Ridge and say Charlotte is what's called suspect terrain. It may be part of North America or it may not. It's been metamorphosed many times and it's difficult to tell where it came from and what it might have been. From Charlotte to about I-95 is what's called exotic terrain. And that was a string of volcanic islands added to the edge of the continent. All of those are what's called exotic terrain and have nothing to do with North America. At Elk Falls and near Blowin Rock, you can see some of the original stone or basement rock making up ancestral North America. This stone is over a billion years old. Along highway cuts and in quarries in the mountains in Piedmont, you can see metamorphosed rock that show the evidence of the awesome forces that pulled and stretched rocks like taffy. People are often surprised to learn that North Carolina was the site of the first great gold discovery in the United States. I asked Chris where and how gold rose to the surface. Of course, even if you live in the exotic terrains, you can't necessarily go in your backyard and find gold. You have to look around the areas where gold was concentrated. And in the exotic terrains, it was generally concentrated by volcanoes driving hot water systems. When I'm talking about hot water, I'm not talking about any hot water you can produce at home. I'm talking about the kind of hot water you would find around a volcano. So around the volcanoes in the exotic terrain, magma chambers would heat up water to supercritical temperatures. So this is superheated water under pressure. That water moves away from its heat source, and as it does, it strips a lot of stuff out of the surrounding rock. It strips out iron, it picks up sulfur, it picks up silicon, and it'll pick up gold or silver. But as it moves farther from the heat source, it starts to cool. And when it starts to cool, it can no longer carry those minerals anymore. So they start to precipitate, usually in veins, and it'll precipitate as quartz, which are the quartz veins. And it'll also precipitate iron and sulfur, which is pyrite. And it will also precipitate gold. So all through the exotic terrains, where you find gold, you find pyrite in quartz veins. If you travel down Highway 49 from Asheboro to Charlotte, you will see the signs and names from North Carolina's Golden Age. Richfield, Gold Hill, and Gold Branch. The most famous gold mine in North Carolina was on the banks of Little Meadow Creek, south of Concord, North Carolina. At the Reed Gold Mine, a state historic site, Jennifer Furr told me about the significance of the mine and the discovery of gold in North Carolina. This is the location of the first documented gold discovery in America, which occurred in 1799. At that time, America was a relatively new country, and no one even dreamed that gold could be found in such large quantities in this country. It was such a big impact that it even caught the attention of then-President Thomas Jefferson, who, rumor has it, had already found small traces of gold in his farm in Virginia. Reed Gold Mine's state historic site is located along the Carolina Slate Belt of North Carolina. Within Reed Gold Mine's boundaries, you can find traces of greenstone. Greenstone is a mineralized rock that contains traces of gold, copper, and silver. Along with the greenstone, milky white quartz and gold can be found in veins or strikes running through the greenstone. Scientists believe that milky white quartz and gold was formed inside of the greenstone due to volcanic activity. This location was important not only because it was the first documented gold discovery in America, but also important for the large size of the nuggets found here. Here, the first nugget, found in 1799 by Conrad Reed, weighed 17 pounds. The largest nugget, weighed 28 pounds, was found in 1803. Most of the nuggets found on top of the ground here at Reed weighed one pound or more. I asked Jennifer about the methods used to mine gold at the site. There are two types of mining that took place at Reed Gold Mine and other area mines in North Carolina. The first type of mining is known as placer mining or above ground mining. That is where the miners would first start along the creek banks and pan for gold. The second type of mining was known as load or underground mining. Once gold was found to be inside of milky white quartz, this discovery led miners to dig deeper inside of the earth to remove the gold-bearing quartz. The weight of gold in relation to the materials around it made placer mining or panning possible. Gold is 19 times heavier than water, 8 times heavier than sand, and 3 times heavier than fool's gold, a form of iron. When everything else was sloshed out of the pan, heavy gold was the last thing remaining. When ore was taken out of quartz veins, it was crushed by Chilean stones or in a stamp mill. As in placer mining, heavy gold would be found on the separating table after the lighter materials washed away. Jennifer explained that early gold miners were an odd mix of people from many backgrounds. The first miners in this area were actually farmers. They did the gold mining more or less as a hobby in between the farming season. Later, Cornish tin miners from England immigrated to this area and also worked in the mines. Before the Civil War, slaves were also used. It has been said that some Native American tribes in the area also had knowledge of gold. This led conquistador Hernando de Soto to the Appalachian Mountains to the Cherokee Indian tribe, where he did find pieces of gold in use there. However, he was unable to find where they mined the gold. He was way too far west. I had to ask Jennifer if she still believes there is North Carolina gold to be found. Yes, I truly believe that there is still gold found here at Reed and along the Carolina Slate Belt. We even had a volunteer at one time who swore that he could smell gold and that the last largest nugget had not been found at Reed Gold Mine yet. Although there is more to the story of gold and the people of North Carolina's gold rush era, there are other great treasures to be found, especially in the western Piedmont and mountains. There are hundreds of collectors called rockhounds or gym hunters. One of the more successful amateur collectors is Doug Hess of Conover, North Carolina. Although he collects a variety of precious and semi-precious treasures, he specializes in corundums, better known to us as sapphires and rubies. I asked Doug what makes North Carolina special. What makes this region so unique for the gym hunter in this western Piedmont area of North Carolina is the abundance and variety of gems that can be found. There's amethysts that can be found, emeralds within short distance, quartz, garnets, and my personal favorite, sapphires, and if I'm lucky, rubies. Under the honeysuckle and red clay of the western Piedmont, there's buried treasure. I was surprised to learn that the gemstones of royalty, such as rubies and sapphires, could be found under humble red clay that had once grown tobacco and corn. Doug showed me what he looks for when searching for these treasures. Basically, I will dig down through some soft material, and as soon as I start hitting hard material, whether it be quartz or limestone, whatever, I start looking for sapphires. And I'll find some sapphires normally. If I'm lucky, I'll find a ruby, but it's mixed within that hard material in the sediment, the bottom of that soft layer of dirt. You can identify sapphires and rubies from the other material that you're going to find in the pocket or hole by, first of all, their tremendous weight. They're much heavier than the other material. Their shape, they're six-sided crystals, and also the sound they make when your shovel hits them. They make a distinctive ding, and it's unlike any sound you've ever heard. I have long known that on the Mohs hardness scale, a rating of 1 to 10, that corundums are almost at the top. Rubies and sapphires are a 9, and only diamonds are harder at a 10. However, during my time with Doug, I learned, oh, so much more about corundums. One of the first things I learned, the most fascinating things I learned about sapphires, were that they come in all colors. They can come in gray, blue, yellow, green, but when they turn red, they're called a ruby. And they are both essentially corundum, but the red is a ruby. Every other color is a sapphire. When the rubies and sapphires first come out of the ground, they're not going to look like much. They're going to be covered with soil. It's not until you get them home and wash them off that you can really tell what you have. One of the things that I have observed about treasure hunting in North Carolina is that it doesn't take much equipment. The type of tools I need for the type of gem hunting I do are simple and inexpensive. All I really need is a screwdriver, a shovel, and some water. The thing that makes this such a great hobby for me is discovery. And from Lewis and Clark to a child on an Easter egg hunt, we're all built to discover things. We enjoy it. It's just the way we're made. And out here you can find things that have never been uncovered since the beginning of time. You find sapphires, rubies, and they're just waiting to be discovered. Although most gem hunters poke holes in the ground out of a sense of wonder, and perhaps because of the slim possibility of finding a giant nugget or perfect ruby, a few have turned their passion into a business. Jamie Hill, who lives in the small town of Hidden Knight, north of Statesville, North Carolina, has shown the gem world high-quality emeralds reported to be among the largest found in North America. Before he told me about his passion for emeralds, I asked Jamie to tell me about the name of his town, Hidden Knight. Hidden Knight is a very unique and rare gemstone that has been discovered here and nowhere else in the world. It's a neon green stone that has beautiful qualities that was discovered in the late 1880s by Professor William Earl Hidden. But what really makes this area unique is all the different combinations and unique varieties of minerals and gemstones. The most common varieties that most people would recognize would be like quartz crystals, clear quartz, smoky quartz, amethysts, pyrites, and micas. For me, however, and all of the other miners and weekend warriors and gem hunters of this area, the most highly prized and elusive of all the gemstones has always been the emerald. The typical emerald found in North Carolina is a hexagonal or six-sided stone that is generally of a lighter green color. I asked Jamie to tell me about the clues he looks for when prospecting for emeralds at his mine near Hidden Knight. As a gem hunter, one of the very first things that I look for when I'm looking for these emerald pockets in the earth are the quartz and the mica veins that could lead to possibly a nest containing emeralds. I also wanted to know from an expert about the characteristics that distinguish emeralds from other gemstones. Emerald is a form of beryl, as is aquamarine. What separates the two is the color, and the emerald color is derived from chromium. As I said earlier, most of the emeralds that are found in North Carolina are of the lighter green variety or shade, but a really great emerald is that deep, deep green with a hint of blue. West of Jamie Hill's operation in Alexander County, there are other famous emerald hunting locations, especially those near Spruce Pine, North Carolina. I asked Chris Tacker to take me to another source of beryl and emeralds. Now for me, the fun doesn't really start until you get all the way to the end of metamorphism, where things start melting and igneous rocks are born. Around the Spruce Pine district are what's known as pegmatites, which are igneous rocks with big crystals. This is a piece of one now. You can see some white feldspar and maybe some quartz in here. One of the common minerals in the pegmatites is a beryl, which is a beryllium mineral. As a gemstone, it's known as an aquamarine or an emerald. What you look for when you're looking for emeralds in Alexander County is you're looking for quartz veins, and the quartz veins will contain feldspars, micas, and tourmalines, as well as the beryls. Some of them will be colored dark green, some of them not. In Spruce Pine, you look for the feldspars, micas, and tourmalines, and you also look for that pegmatite containing the feldspar, mica, and tourmaline right next door to a very dark rock that would be the source of the chromium. North Carolina has a number of gem and mineral clubs and hundreds and perhaps thousands of collectors. A few, however, take their love of gemstones to a new level by cutting and polishing them. One man who does it all is Mike Janes of Linville, North Carolina. I asked Mike about his work as a collector and gem cutter. I feel very fortunate to have grown up in the Marion and Spruce Pine area. Within this 40-mile radius, there's a very diverse region for rocks, gems, and minerals. It's a collector's paradise for hunting minerals. In this area, probably the most well-known and most valuable varieties we will find would be in the beryl family, golden beryl, aquamarine, and, of course, emerald. Also, you may find sapphire and ruby from the corundum family. Also in this area, we have some lesser-known gemstones, which are also beautiful. The garnet family is found here. The rhodolite garnet in particular is beautiful, which was named after the rhododendron. Although I am a hunter and collector of gemstones, I really like to cut them. I cut gemstones year-round, and of the North Carolina varieties, I guess I've cut more aquamarine than anything else. When I'm cutting a stone or teaching somebody to cut a stone, I first try to visualize the right shape for this piece of rough I've got. If it's kind of rectangular, I want to get an emerald cut. If it's kind of deep, maybe, and roundish, maybe a deep, round Portuguese cut, something that will maximize the beauty and the weight of the stone that you've got to work with. Today, we have seen many of the world's most important and valuable gemstones. But I asked Chris Tacker, curator of geology, if there are missing pieces in the North Carolina gem puzzle, and if there are discoveries yet to be made. The final puzzle in North Carolina gemstones is where did the diamonds come from? During panning of stream sediments for gold, gold miners found 13 diamonds scattered all across the state, Franklin County and Burke County. So there's the clues there. They found the diamonds and quite likely threw away even more than they found, because diamonds don't really look like diamonds in the rough. But there's that final enigma. Where did these diamonds come from? What's a constant source of wonder for the collectors is that you can find all of these minerals within the bounds of one state, and really within about a 500-mile radius of each other. And people come from far and wide to collect here. Now, we may no longer be a major producer of gold. We may not be a major producer of corundum for abrasives. But this is still a rockhound's paradise. As geologist at the State Museum of Natural Sciences, I field a lot of phone calls. And one of the frequently asked questions is, do you think there are still major finds to be made in North Carolina? And I think the answer is yes. Life's got a lot of surprises left for us. As long as there are people out there working hard at it, then there's a lot of stuff still on the ground that's yet to see the light of day. How fortunate we are to have colors around us and beneath our feet. All the colors of the earth.