AN emerald so big it’s being compared with the crown jewels of Russian empress Catherine the Great has been found on a US farm.
The nearly 65-carat emerald was pulled from a pit on a farm in North Carolina once so well known among treasure hunters that the owners charged $3 a day to shovel for small samples of the green stones.
After the gem being marketed by the name Carolina Emperor was cut and re-cut, the finished product was about one-fifth the weight of the original find, making it slightly larger than a US quarter and about as heavy as an AA battery.
The emerald compares in size and quality to one surrounded by diamonds in a brooch once owned by Catherine the Great, who was empress in the 18th century, that Christie’s auction house in New York sold in April for $1.85 million, said CR “Cap” Beesley, a New York gemologist who examined the stone.
While big, uncut crystals and even notable gem-quality emeralds have come from the community northwest of Charlotte called Hiddenite, there has never been one so big it’s worthy of an imperial treasury, Mr Beesley said.
“It is the largest cut emerald ever to be found in North America,” Beesley said.
Terry Ledford, 53, found the roughly 5cm square chunk rimmed with spots of iron a year ago on a 80-hectare farm owned by business partner Renn Adams, 90, and his siblings. The rural community of Hiddenite is named for a paler stone that resembles emerald.
“It was so dark in colour that holding it up to the sun you couldn’t even get the light to come through it,” a quality that ensured an intense green hue once the stone was cut with facets that allowed light into the gem’s core, Mr Ledford said.
The North Carolina stone was cut to imitate the royal emerald, Mr Ledford said. A museum and some private collectors interested in buying the emerald have been in contact, he added.
Modelling an empress’s emerald is likely to have less influence on the North Carolina stone’s sale price than its clarity, colour and cut, said Douglas Hucker, CEO of the American Gem Trade Association, a Dallas, Texas-based trade association for dealers in coloured gems.
“A 65-carat cut emerald from North Carolina is a big, big stone,” he said. But “once an emerald is cut, it’s subject to the same type of market conditions that any emerald would be”.
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