Reaching below a crystal, he saw what looked to be part of a 7UP bottle. Using a track hoe and other equipment, Ledford worked his way down a hole in the earth and through a quartz vein, 14 feet below the surface. "It was just a normal digging day," said Adams, who used to grade roads before he retired. "We never found any good emeralds," said Adams. They unearthed hiddenite, a rare pale-to-green mineral in the spodumene family, and other specimens. The men's interests became intertwined early this decade when they became partners on the Adams family farm, which grows corn along with its treasures below. His Alexander County family has been digging for them since the 1880s. Renn Adams, 90, the world of spodumenes, hiddenite and beryl runs even deeper in his blood. "I always loved rocks," said the Spruce Pine resident.įor W. The passion started early for Terry Ledford, 53, who operated a gem stand on weekends when he was a kid. Kennedy, Elvis, Rosa Parks and more.įamous star rubies include the "Rosser Reeves Star Ruby," which is 138.7 carats and held at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the "De Long Star Ruby," weighing 100 carats at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.(CNN) - Generations of rock hounds and miners have turned the earth in western North Carolina, looking to bring a special ruby, sapphire or emerald - the "big three" of the gem world - to the light. The family contacted Guernsey's, known for unusual sales including possessions of John F. The family tried to sell the stones for 10 years, but with appraisals approaching $100 million for the entire collection, there were few buyers, Garden & Gun reported. Shortly after the exhibition, Messer died and the collection was returned to his family where it has "quietly resided ever since," according to Guernsey's. They were the first star rubies found in western North Carolina, according to Arlan Ettinger, founder and president of Guernsey's. “I knew it was something special, but I didn’t realize how important the stones would be.” “When I found it, there was a red-tailed hawk that soared right over me,” Messer told local talk show North Carolina Now in an early 1990s interview, as reported by Garden & Gun magazine. The Mountain Star Ruby collection is "all the more astounding for its North American origin," according to Guernsey's.Īfter Messer discovered the stones in 1990, they were examined by leading geological testing labs in the United States and in Europe before an exhibition of one of the stones at the Natural History Museum in London, where a record audience of 150,000 people viewed the ruby over two weeks. Very few have been found in the United States, in areas including Montana, South Carolina, Wyoming and North Carolina.
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But deposits also have been found in Thailand, India, Afghanistan, Brazil, Colombia, Tanzania, Vietnam, Namibia, Scotland and Japan. Most are rarer and more valuable than diamonds of comparable size.įor hundreds of years, Myanmar was the world's main source for rubies. Star rubies are the rarest rubies, according to Guernsey's, and they are among the most valuable types of colored gemstones available in the world. "Volumes could easily be written about the remarkable discovery by a modest mountain man from western North Carolina ( Jarvis Wayne Messer, of Buncombe County) who, as a self-described 'rock hound,' was constantly in search of rare and unusual stones in his native Appalachia," according to Guernsey's, a New York-based auction house.