Galena (RARE locality specimen)

Item Description

The Shullsburg area is best known for producing distinctive Calcite specimens, and sulfide specimens are rather rare to find on the market. This piece dates back to the 1960s, and originally was part of the Andy Frederick collection, and it's arguably the best Galena from Shullsburg that we've ever had to offer from the locality. Many fine quality, well-formed, cuboctahedral crystals of a dark silvery-grey shade measuring up to 1.7 cm across, sit atop chert matrix with a small amount of associated white Calcite. Nearly every crystal on the piece is pristine, maybe only a tiny amount of imperfections can be seen up close, but it's a really impressive display specimen of this seldom-seen material from this historic Upper Mississippi Valley mining area that encompassed at least 125 different mines.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 2611 WI.4; 9272 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