in
1852, by Dr. C. L. Hunter, near Cottage Home, Lincoln County. It is
described as an elongated octahedron of a delicate greenish tint,
transparent, and about half a carat in weight. Another, said to be a
very handsome white crystal of 1 carat, was obtained in the same year,
at Todd's Branch, Mecklenburg County; it became the property of
the late Dr. Andrews, of Charlotte, N. C, who also informed Prof. Genth
that a beautiful black stone " as large as a chinquapin " was
afterwards found by some gold-washers in the same locality. This
specimen, unfortunately, was crushed with a hammer, sharing the fate of
several American diamonds when submitted to the mistaken test which
confounds hardness with strength. The fragments of the black diamond
scratched corundum with ease, thereby proving its genuineness.5
Soon after this two diamonds, one a beautiful octahedron, were
reported by Prof. F. A. Genth, as obtained at the Portis mine, in
Franklin County. This locality is far removed from the others in North
Carolina,—a point which is referred to presently.
Two
discoveries are recorded in McDowell County, one of two or three small
crystals found at the headwaters of Muddy Creek, and the other a fine
stone picked up at a spring near Dysartville, in 1886.° This was a
distorted and twinned hexoctahedron, of 4-1/3 carats,, transparent,
with a grayish-green tint. The little son of Mr. Grayson Christie,
going for water to a spring on the farm of Alfred Bright, observed this
peculiar shining pebble, and brought it home. After some local interest
had developed, its nature was suspected, and it was sent to New York
and there at once identified. A model of it was exhibited at the Paris
Exposition of 1889, and is now in the Tiffany-Morgan collection of the
American Museum of Natural History. The present writer subsequently
visited the spot, and fully authenticated all the facts of the
discovery. The sediment in the bed of the spring was taken out and
examined, and also the small hollows on the adjacent hillside. None of
the ordinary associations of the diamond were observed, and hence it is
probable that the crystal was washed down with decomposing rock-soil
from higher ground, perhaps during some freshet; or possibly it may
have been carried to the spring by miners, and left unobserved or
unrecognized among the "wash-up" of the gold-bearing sand from some
neighboring placer. There are gold mines in McDowell County, worked
chiefly by hydraulic sluicing, but as a rule the stones that remain in
the sluices are carefully examined, as the miners know that gems are
sometimes thus found. The value of the Dysartville diamond as a jewel
will hardlv represent the
