BACKROADS • AUGUST 2021
Page 17
Morton’s BMW Motorcycles presents Dr. Seymour O’Life’s
MYSTERIOUS AMERICA
The Curious Case of the Jones Diamond Was the largest diamond in North America found in a West Virginia horseshoe pit? Diamonds are forever, They are all I need to please me, They can stimulate and tease me, They won’t leave in the night, I’ve no fear that they might desert me. Shirley Bassey We have spent a great deal of time in West “By God” Virginia. It remains one of our favorite places to go riding motorcycles. But every backroad has a story and some are a bit stranger than others. Along Route 219, just on the other side of the mountains where you will find the Mountain Lake Lodge, our two-night lodging this past Backroads Spring Break, you will find the small town of Peterstown, West Virginia. Back some 92 years ago, in the summer of 1928, a father and son were enjoying a beautiful afternoon and having a friendly game of horseshoes in a vacant lot along Rich Creek, near their home. The father’s name was Grover Jones and his son was named William,
but everyone knew him as “Punch.” According to the late historian Shirley Donnelly, “When Punch pitched his horseshoe, it struck a bright object in the hole,” Donnelly wrote in a February 23, 1974 column ‘Yesterday and Today’ in The Beckley Post-Herald. “When dug out, it proved to be a rounded, faceted, glassy mass. It was about three-quarters of an inch in diameter,” Donnelly said. “Although he had expressed the wild notion that he had found a diamond, it was several years before the stone was actually determined to be a diamond.” Punch carried the rock home and stowed it in a box in the tool shed. Fifteen years later, however, he presented it to geology professor Roy J. Holden at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, now Virginia Tech, who examined the stone and declared that it was, in fact, a diamond. “It is my opinion that this is a diamond,” Donnelly quoted Holden as having determined. “It is of good color and appears to be comparatively free from imperfections. It is the largest one ever found in the eastern United States.”
