Copper

Item Description

Copper specimens from the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan are world famous for their size, quality and excellent form/crystallization. This piece is a beautiful example from this historic White Pine Mine, which operated from 1880 to 1995, and according to the entry on mindat.org, produced four billion pounds of copper and 45 million ounces of silver in that time. This piece is a lovely cabinet sized display piece featuring a crystalline "sheet" of copper with a beautiful arborescent form, aesthetically sitting on matrix (thought to be basalt on the label). There are some beautiful bright blue patches on the piece, which at first looked like Chrysocolla, but the species is not reported from this locality, and I have seen a few specimens online that state this blue color is due to oxidation of Bornite, so that could be a possibility, and there's also a chance it could be Connellite. A wonderful aesthetic matrix display specimen from one of the great localities in the Copper Country of Michigan. The piece originally was part of the Ross Lillie collection, and came to George through Joe Dague.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 1114 MI.10; 9525 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