Malachite (rare locality specimen)

Item Description

A beautiful, fine quality and showy thumbnail specimen from this locality in far northern North Carolina, near the border with Virginia (close to the town of Virgilina). This piece features a few botryoidal aggregates of attractive green colored Malachite measuring up to 1.0 cm, free of matrix. Good thumbnails of this material are quite difficult to find, so if you're a thumbnail collector or a fan of Malachite/copper minerals or even specimens from North Carolina, this is something that you're not likely to find again on the market anytime soon.
From the collection of Norman Kennedy ("Kenny") Gay (1953-2023), a geologist, geoscience educator and mineral collector from North Carolina. (#M28 C.2). Originally from the collection of Russ Holshouser. Kenny worked for North Carolina Geological Survey starting 1995, and he was a member of the adjunct faculty at Wesleyan College, and a professor of geology since 2001. He assembled a large collection of worldwide minerals specimens, though he focused mainly on minerals of North Carolina. Kenny did substantial work documenting all of the significant mineral occurrences and mining/mineral collecting in North Carolina. He might be best associated with the Redmond Mine, where the rare extremely rare lead sulfate Kennygayite was discovered and named in his honor in 2022. Kenny was the first person to collect specimens at this locality, which lead Jason Smith to take an interest in this assemblage, and later name a mineral in Kenny's honor.