Fluorite on Quartz coating Fluorite

Item Description

A beautiful specimen from the famed Camp Bird Mine. This historic locality is well-known in Colorado lore as it was originally discovered by Thomas Walsh in 1896. The riches he gained from selling the mine made him a fortune totaling $5,200,000 in 1902 according to the entry on Wikipedia.com (the equivalent of $190,000,000 today) Walsh's daughter, Evalyn Walsh McLean, famously purchased the Hope Diamond with her family newly found wealth. Here we have a beautiful specimen featuring tiny colorless cubes of Fluorite measuring to a few mm, sitting atop a layer of snow-white sparkling Quartz which is coating a 3.1 cm cubic crystal of Fluorite from an earlier deposition. If you flip the piece over, you'll see there is a bit of gemmy green Fluorite underneath indicating that the large cube underneath the Quartz coating is likely green as well. No damage, outside of the periphery where the piece was removed from the pocket. This specimen was collected by Robert Stoufer in 1995.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 9.2.1 CO.4; 3375. 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