Copper

Item Description

Crystallized Copper arguably is at its finest from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The beautiful display specimens, often featuring fine crystals, from this area are world famous. This piece is a dramatic and showy crystallized "tree" of Native Copper with distinct, well-formed crystals measuring up to 2.1 cm, free of matrix. The piece not only has excellent form an aesthetics, but the fact that it's fully crystallized is noteworthy as well. Although it's impossible to know specifically where this piece was mined, I can say it could be as much as 100+ years old, as many mines in the Upper Peninsula shut down as far back as the 1920s since most mines closed during the Great Depression as a result of depressed copper prices according to the entry on Wikipedia.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 1114 MI.7; 8509 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