Exploring the Gemstone Mines of North Carolina: Little Switzerland and Spruce Pines.

[Music] we drove about eight hours today leaving washington dc we're just outside of charlotte we're in salisbury north carolina for lunch it's one of or maybe the oldest city in eastern south carolina and the main street looks just like a main street should classic so we discovered that there is a soda that's from this place 1917. dr pepper [Music] so we are currently outside of spruce pines north carolina we just drove down about two hours and we are now in emerald country we're currently sitting outside of emerald village which is kind of a museum mining place tourist attraction and as we were driving through the mountains which by the way are incredibly beautiful we saw probably already three or four different places where you can stop and do mining here and so we're gonna go check it out we're gonna go check out some of the oldest emerald mines of north carolina and just see what the museum has to offer [Music] what do you think milo is there [Music] the old rock crusher so we're at the bon ami mine and it was primarily a feldspar mine and we can see some of the feldspar here which reminds us a lot of the host rock that we saw up in maine at the tourmaling islands we're also finding non-precious quartz tons of mica which we also saw up in the mines in maine so here we can see those mica sheets shining so here's some of the old mining equipment that i had double track cars supply cars cans and buckets for transporting mined rocks so while they used to be working here back in the 18 and early 1900s they had diverted the water so there was no waterfall but once the mine was abandoned in the 1960s the waterfall came back and the water level rose and you can see down in here there's an old abandoned mine that used to be accessible by foot but now is all filled with water [Music] this is a steam winch which was used for hoisting muck from the mine and also pulling railroad cars [Music] so this is a wagon drill you can see they kind of have it set up so the drill can be set up at any angle and they can take this into the mine and drill the holes they needed to drill to do the mining once they had the holes drilled they put dynamite in there and then they could do blasting old cage elevator here's an old steam engine this would run hoist pumps steam drills can't imagine what it would have sounded like especially if it's down in the mining area in the mine [Music] so here's one of the old mine cars this would've been running into the mine they'd fill it up with stuff and then you can unload it on both sides so you can pull it out here dump out what you've got see what it is so here's the workshop that has all the tools they need for keeping all the gear running and operational and now we enter the underground mine [Music] so mining was done here from about 1924 up until the 1940s and then in the 50s it was abandoned it sat here for 30 years after that filling up with water and then finally in the 1980s it drained some of the water and turned it into this tourist attraction and you can actually see the water line here this is how high it was filled up and they had to actually cut a drainage ditch in to be able to let the water come down so that you could actually walk around in here and that's permanently keeping the water out now so here's more of the mining and drilling equipment the core drills the steam drills the jacks the carts did you ever wonder how miners went to the bathroom this is the sanitary potty car the original moving porta potties that could be pulled by mules and everybody's looking at what you're doing when you're doing it kind of gross [Music] so this is the fluorescent minerals room [Music] you can see here a quartz vein going up all over the whole roof but they weren't looking for quartz being in this mining locality reminds us so much of what it was like to be in the mining locality of maine but not only that you know thinking about some of the other gemstone cutting centers that i've been to in different parts of the world like the gym cutting region in france the jura up in the mountains up there you know as we're driving up through the winding roads up across the mountains down and just seeing how similar it is you know all these places the jura the gym cutting region in the czech republic the cutting and mining ranging up in maine and now here in north carolina just so amazing to see the similarities and this one's so cool you can see there's all these mining equipment and apparatus from the 1930s and 40s that are still here so we can just get a glimpse but so amazing after going to some of these different places and just seeing how similar in spirit they are almost as if all the mining localities of the world are somehow connected [Music] so part two of the emerald village experience is the discovery mill here's the first bit of gym cutting machinery that we've seen so far sign says it was made by frantum probably in the 1950s and belonged to charles russell a master gym cutter and the grandfather of the owner of emerald village [Music] you know what we're all about here cutting so you can get your gravel bucket and sort it all out [Music] [Music] we're at another tourist destination called the emerald mine [Music] so that makes it special it makes it special second it's clean enough that it will pass it 40 to 50 characters are you ever gonna try and cut it finger size oh wow but but not totally clean because they were embedded in the feldspar i knew when i saw that i had to have that yeah yeah yeah it was during that time that they found the big emerald well yeah he's the one that found him his name was bill collins it was 76 when he found it okay it's the big oh it's only a legend to the people who know the legend yeah right this is the bucket ship okay we needed a place to stay for the night and i found this place online it looked kind of cool and old timey and man where are we correct look at this view for dinner we came over to burnsville about 30 minutes from where we're staying and just checking out a little bit of a downtown and it looks really cool lots of little independent shops restaurants and uh hopefully some good dinner food we've got some real southern appalachian food here all the good stuff the coleslaws and the potatoes the mushroom hat so after dinner we went to spruce pine which is the bigger town around here we thought we should come check it out we saw on some signs that it's the gem of the mountains and we found the gem shop so let's check out out through the window it definitely looks like a pretty cool shop lots of minerals little spheres big old amethyst stuff a very classic gym shop too bad it's not open right now we are in the chalet restaurant for breakfast and the view [Music] so we just discovered that four minutes walk away from our hotel there is the museum of north carolina minerals there's a certain type of font that i really associate with both national parks and mineralogy magazines of the 1950s and 60s and this sign really has that vibe and i really like it [Music] [Music] his daddy had an old-timey water field and the ground corn for the public wrote it he made his own machine a plastic machine and he puts it up to his deadly water wheel but his daddy was grinding corn he was cutting a gemstone [Music] so here we are at the crabtree emerald mine this is the famous mine of north carolina it's been mined back since the 1890s and even tiffany and companies to mine here from about 1895 to like 1905 one of the old cars that pulled the cable cars up okay you know the crane would back up over here and they took the cable and they'd pulled the cars out of the mine and of course they were looking for emeralds and everything tossed up here and it's been years and years but was the tailings from digging the mines yeah and people come up here and hammer through them and sometimes you find quartz and different things in them so over here is the tailings from the mine the mine is now underwater but this is where they would throw all the waste material and so our hope today is to start busting some of this mica and feldspar up and just see if there's any green inside so this one we think is the right kind of rock it's that sort of mica schist [Music] so there's all kinds of minerals out here you've got regular old massive quartz you've got micah stuff uh in the feldspar you've got black tourmaline and then i think this which has a a hint of purple might be lepid i saw this in maine the purple mica so yeah all kinds of different stuff but so far no green [Music] [Music] so this is the original mine the shaft it goes back to the 1890s and the early 1900s the whole thing's filled up with water now so it kind of looks like a pond but i think if you drain this out it's it's really deep and this is where all those emeralds were coming from in the early 1900s and stuff like that [Music] [Music] so [Music] so we are at our next gym mine attraction this is the rio doche gem mine they've got kind of the similar thing that the other ones do you can come and sort through the buckets and see what you find oh and this one has lapidary glasses [Music] we got a selection of golden barrels from the crabtree mine we haven't seen that before we're in the back of the rio doche shop and they've got all these beautiful gem master twos so you guys are teaching people how to do the fasting and also how to do calving and we teach um it's a six week course if you do the full six weeks um you get a certificate at the end of it we do day classes also just to introduce people into fasting well that was very cool all those really cool fasting machines and of course just like all the other places they got the sorting area you can get your gym bucket see what you find our final stop for the spruce pines area is gem mountain another one of the classic attractions to sort of bucket let's check it out great [Music] got some local stuff and other stuff from all over the world [Music] let's go see what's inside the old gem mountain mine [Music] [Music] so our mini adventure in north carolina is coming to an end we had a really awesome time seeing some of the mining localities seeing the emerald mine and meeting some of the gem cutters out here and even though that we didn't find our own stone in the crabtree mine we did come home with a souvenir that we got in one of the shops we wanted to have our own north carolina emerald to take home with us so in this rock we can see the base material is feldspar and we've got black tourmaline and of course the green barrel emerald which is what we came to see our adventure is pretty much over and we look forward to the next time that we can come visit the blue ridge mountains and hopefully we'll get to see the mining localities of hidden night thanks for watching and come back for more adventures as we travel across the country visiting gem mining localities and gemstone cutters as we document the history of american gem cutting see you next time [Music]

Channel: Justin K Prim

Views: 80,384

Keywords: faceting, faceting machine, faceter, handpiece, mast, Justin k prim, gemcutting, lapidary, lapidaire, edelsteinschleifer, institute of gem trading, igt, facet, gemcutter, wizard, class, instruction, how to, learn, school, educational, tips, tricks, course, polish, cut, stone, gem, gemstone, jewel, jewelry, hand, craft, art, artisan, artistry, wizardry, sterling, polymetric, ultratec, facetron, graves, scintillator, hand piece, piece

Id: XdevaDgeNBE

Length: 21min 36sec (1296 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 24 2022