Calcite on Fluorite

Item Description

A fantastic association specimen from the famed Minerva No. 1 Mine in Hardin County, Illinois featuring many fine quality, well-formed, tapered trigonal prismatic crystals of light yellow to nearly white colored Calcite crystals which are covering a "core" of gemmy golden and purple Fluorite underneath. It's hard to isolate a single crystal to measure the largest one, but I can say they measure at least up to 2.3 cm, though clusters of crystals are certainly bigger. The piece is in amazingly good condition, as a large number of the Calcites are undamaged. What a showy and eye-catching, three-dimensional display specimen from this now closed, historic locality. The piece was originally in the collection of Roy Smith, who assembled a great collection of Southern Illinois specimens. Valued $4,000
Ex George Loud Collection No. 14.1.1.1 IL.39; 8578 George (born August 16, 1942) is a well-known mineral collector from Washington, DC and South Carolina respectively, and was a patent lawyer by trade for over 50 years. He assembled one of the great mineral collections in the U.S., comprising worldwide specimens, and in later years he sold the worldwide specimens to focus on minerals of the United States, specifically locality suites with an emphasis on amazing representation of species while still maintaining fine quality. The specimens remarkably range from micros to all the way up to large cabinets in size. We recently acquired most of his impressive 9000+ piece collection, and the VAST majority of these pieces will be offered here in the auctions, as we feel that everyone deserves and equal opportunity at acquiring these important, well-documented and fine quality specimens for their collections.
See: https://mineralogicalrecord.com/biographies_labels/george-loud for more information