Hidden in the Hills 

When Daniel Coleman’s 15-month-old son died suddenly after being hit by a car, Coleman’s devastation turned to debilitating anger. One day, he stepped out of his house, dropped to his knees, and lifted his hands to ask God to help him learn how to love again. 

“Something was like, ‘cut the grass,’” Coleman said. “‘Do something. Stop crying and get up.’” Moments later, Coleman’s lawnmower chipped a quartz cluster so large it had “points the size of your thumb.” 

Days later, he found an even more impressive “double terminated” crystal that had perfect, natural points on both ends. “I was like, oh my god, is someone dropping these things?” Coleman, who knew nothing about gems and minerals, soon couldn’t think of anything else. So he started to dig, right there in the yard.

“After seven years of digging, I had eight 10-foot holes and a six-inch seam of amethyst,” Coleman said. 

Amethyst, found in counties all over North Carolina, is an iron-containing quartz that turns purple with exposure to natural radiation over millions of years. Finding a seam, or a vein, was a promising sign that Coleman could find a large pocket of fully formed crystals.

For Coleman, digging in the yard was just scratching the surface. He quit his restaurant job and started working at Emerald Hollow Mine in the small town of Hiddenite in Alexander County, where the eponymous pale green spodumene, known to be found only in North Carolina, was first discovered in the late 19th century. Coleman spent days and nights researching, excavating, and learning from mentors, ultimately cobbling together a self-education in local geology.

Twelve years later, Coleman runs Digging with Daniel, which organizes private digs for gems and helps property owners determine if they have valuable mineral deposits on their land. What Coleman found in his time of despair was more than a crystal. It was his calling.

A Lapidary Lottery

North Carolina is home to more than five hundred minerals, a result of the state once having been part of the African continent, said Tom Lapp, director of the Mineral & Lapidary Museum in Henderson County. 

It’s hard to imagine how events that took place 250 million years ago could still be so resonant. But when it comes to geology, history isn’t just written in the pages of textbooks; it’s written into the earth with mineral deposits that are hunted, collected, and sold, sometimes for millions of dollars, by generations of recreational miners known as “rockhounds” across the western part of the state.

In 1990, a fisherman named Jarvis Wayne Messer saw a red-tailed hawk outside his Asheville-area home, an auspicious sign. That day, he found “The Appalachian Star Ruby,” a deep red stone with a star-like pattern known as asterism, a phenomenon that only occurs when a mineral called rutile forms needle-like inclusions in a growing host stone. Star rubies tend to be found in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, which made Messer’s discovery—possibly the first in North Carolina—all the more remarkable. 

But despite multiple attempts to sell the stone, including a 2018 effort at a New York auction house that appraised it at $90 million, the ruby has largely been forgotten. 

When I asked Lapp why that was, he told a cautionary tale about overzealous jewelers. “I bought a North Carolina star ruby ring in 1971 at a J.C. Penney counter in New Jersey,” he said. “They’re talking millions of dollars because they said those were the first ever found, and I’m like, no. Trust me, no.”

A gem’s value has always been somewhat subjective. Despite beryl being a relatively rare mineral, only its emerald variety can be worth tens of thousands of dollars per carat. Meanwhile, other beryl varieties like the delicate, blush-pink morganite are popular on wedding blogs as “budget-friendly” alternatives for diamond engagement rings. 

“Anything you polish up could be considered a gem,” said Lapp. “But the royal gems, the big four, are diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires.” By the late 1880s, three of the four had been discovered in North Carolina. 

Retired police officer Rick Jacquot has spent over 20 years searching for valuable gems in Western North Carolina. In 2000, he founded Asheville’s Mountain Area Gem and Mineral Association to organize recreational digs. More recently, Jacquot owned a mine in Hiddenite for eight years until finally deciding to sell it. “We found beryl crystals, quartz crystals, lots of other stuff,” he said, but not the prized emeralds he had hoped for. “I would not rely on my mineral business to pay my bills.”

Still, there are always exceptions. In 2009, Terry Ledford, the son of a mica miner in Spruce Pine, found the largest emerald ever discovered in North America at 310 carats. The cut piece, which ultimately sold for $1.65 million, is now housed in the North Carolina Mining and Minerals Museum in Raleigh. According to Jacquot, who’s been rockhounding for decades, finding a stone like that isn’t so much about expertise. It’s about hitting the jackpot.

“Now, you get lucky like them, you pull out a three, or four, or five hundred carat emerald?” Jacquot said. “I mean, then you’re rich.”

Scratching the Surface

Gold was first discovered in North Carolina in 1799, leading to a rush that helped expedite the forced removal of the Cherokee people as white settlers sought to take over land they believed to be brimming with the precious metal. 

In Western North Carolina, miners only discovered gemstones incidentally while unearthing industrial minerals. In the 19th century, large-scale mines extracted sheet mica for panels in wood-burning stoves and shades for open-flame lights. When miners came across sapphires, they tossed them aside as a nuisance. 

Similarly, before being appreciated for its gemstone varieties of ruby and sapphire, corundum— the second hardest natural substance after diamonds—was mined as an abrasive. According to a 1993 newsletter from the Southern Appalachian Mineral Society, people in the Cowee Valley had grown up with facet-quality rubies all their lives. “They had shot them in their bean shooters, made “cherry” mud pies and skipped them across the creek,” the newsletter read.

In the late 1880s, a short-lived treasure hunt began with gem mining operations opening in Macon, Clay, Alexander, and Mitchell counties. But within 30 years, the excitement had faded. In 1907, Tiffany & Co. gemologist George Frederick Kunz wrote that “the gem mines of North Carolina have not proved remunerative enough to warrant a continued development.” Gems were too small and were found too infrequently for domestic gem mining to turn a profit.

The mines were abandoned or reimagined. Housing developments were built over them, sometimes with rubies mixed into the foundation. 

Old mica mines in Spruce Pine, including some that have been in use for centuries, were repurposed to extract the purest quartz in the world. In the 1950s and ‘60s, several small-scale mines were reopened in the Cowee Valley, giving hopefuls a chance to search for treasure in buckets of ore. Most visitors didn’t get any richer, but Franklin’s tourism industry did. Although the United States imports billions more dollars in gems than it exports, Franklin still calls itself the “Gem Capital of the World.”

Some Western North Carolina mines are more like roadside attractions dressed up in theme. I visited one such souvenir store in Hendersonville where, in addition to washing buckets of ore at an indoor sluice, I could feed goats and drink German beer. 

An employee told me that the crystals in my bucket were purchased in bulk from Africa and South America, and I thought of how Mark Twain allegedly said that a mine is just a hole with a liar next to it. But when I held up three Ziplock bags full of rocks and asked if I’d found anything valuable, the clerk’s smile was my honest answer, clear as common quartz.

Mining for More

True rockhounds tend to skip the tourist traps. Their hobby involves juxtaposing old geologic maps with newer, interactive ones, investigating the locations of closed mines and attempting to reopen them, and reading the earth’s features for clues as to where a valuable specimen might be hiding. 

It’s a modern-day treasure hunt, except instead of X marking the spot, it’s igneous and metamorphic rock.

I asked Tracie Jeffries, former president of the Catawba Gem and Mineral Club, if I might be able to find a locally mined North Carolina mineral like pyrite or smoky quartz in one of downtown Asheville’s many crystal shops. 

“No,” said Jeffries. “The material is limited, and the stuff coming out of Brazil and overseas is cheaper.” To find a North Carolina specimen, I’d have to locate a “smaller, private dealer,” most of whom are only known by word of mouth. The other option would be a museum.

More than half of the Asheville Museum of Science’s collection is from Western North Carolina. “Some pieces are meant to be handled and explored, while others are preserved, for their rarity, cultural significance, or the bigger stories they tell about how Earth works,” said museum director Amanda Bryant. 

Many rockhounds agree that preserving home-grown minerals in their original form is a way of respecting the area’s unique geologic features. When Coleman brought a friend to a local gem show to purchase a $7,000 piece of uncut Hiddenite, he warned his friend not to tell the dealer that he planned to have it made into jewelry. 

But most of what’s mined here isn’t likely to be worn on a ring. Dull and gray “aggregates,” or crushed stone, sand, and gravel, make up 80% of North Carolina’s mined resources. 

Most is “surface mining,” University of North Carolina Asheville geology professor Brittani McNamee said. It tends to look like the North Buncombe quarry, where, only a few miles from downtown Asheville, a sprawling desert of cratered earth dotted with granite-stacked pyramids runs alongside the French Broad River. Here, miners don’t crawl into underground tunnels or descend hundreds of feet into shafts. They drive enormous front-end loaders that crush rocks into gravel used for paving parking lots.

Surface mines are generally considered safer than underground mines, but they still present risks to nearby communities. In Mitchell County, an unpermitted mine that opened after Hurricane Helene generated so much dust and chemical runoff that residents began a months-long fight to close it last year. 

While industry regulations and federal legislation can mitigate some of that harm, McNamee says that mining will always have an impact on local ecosystems. “Whether you are for mining or against mining, the hard truth is that if we can’t grow it, we have to mine it,” she said. “Globally, we’re running out of resources because mineral resources aren’t renewable. The more we mine, the more we deplete it.”

Even among recreational miners, there’s a sense that perhaps the best specimens have been depleted from the mountains. “It seems like it’s always a little bit less for the next generation,” Jacquot said. He’s seen a “big decline” in how much people find at the Crabtree Emerald Mine in Hiddenite, which he’s managed since 2006. “You can only turn over the same dirt so many times, and it’s just not productive.” 

Still, he and many other rockhounds hope that new generations develop a love and curiosity for the land. Jeffries’ club in the Catawba Valley funds a scholarship for geology students at Appalachian State University. Coleman, who organizes private digs mostly in people’s backyards, always allows kids for free. 

Perhaps humans are drawn to rocks not for monetary value but because, through them, we sense a connection to the infinite beyond. The basic elements that make up human bodies—including carbon, oxygen, and iron—have been in our solar system as early cosmic material for billions of years, even before Earth existed. 

In the Blue Ridge Mountains, there’s a stone called staurolite that forms as the result of a geological process called twinning. But that’s just what the scientists say; others claim that cross-shaped stones are the hardened tears of fairies who’ve just learned about Jesus Christ’s crucifixion. 

For Coleman, digging in North Carolina is meaningful because it’s where his son is buried. “By playing in the ground, I feel like I’m speaking with him. I’ll get in a hole, and I’ll be like, ‘Hey, what am I doing today? Am I doing good? Am I doing bad?’” 

It isn’t always a cluster of crystals, but something always answers.