Prehnite with Quartz (ex Chet Lemanski Collection)

Item Description

This piece is labeled only as coming from "Livingston", so I don’t know if it's from Riker Hill or somewhere more obscure. It features a layer of soft green spherical groups of Prehnite which play host to off-white colored, unusually skeletal or "hoppered" crystals of Quartz. The Quartz crystals do not resemble any Quartz I can remember seeing from any New Jersey trap rock locality, and they almost look like partially dissolved fossilized teeth. A pretty interesting and unusual specimen from Hook Mountain (Third Watchung Mountain) of northern New Jersey. From the collection of Chester ("Chet") S. Lemanski Jr. of Browns Mills, New Jersey (https://www.mindat.org/user-461.html). Collection #2927CL. Chet was born 1947 in started collecting minerals circa 1957. He worked briefly as a drill runner at the famous Sterling Mine, in Ogdensburg, New Jersey and from 1987 to 1990 he helped convert the mine into a public access mining museum. He has held the role of treasurer, vice president and president of the Franklin-Ogdensburg Mineralogical Society (FOMS), and has been a board member and vice president of the Franklin Mineral Museum. The rare copper arsenate, Lemanskiite was named in his honor in 1999.