MYSTERIOUS AMERICA

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.

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.”

Shirley Bassey

West Virginia is known for many things – great people, great music, great roads – not so much for diamonds. Yet, here it be.

Geologists are still at a loss to explain how it got here, though speculation has never died down.

The Punch Jones Diamond—also known as the Horseshoe Diamond—remains the largest alluvial diamond ever discovered in North America and the third largest found on the continent overall.

The Jones diamond was later exhibited at the Smithsonian, where Donnelly saw it, observing that its hardness was “such that a corner of the crystal readily scratches sapphire and a crystal face of carborundum. In the air, the high refractive power of the stone is indicated by the brilliance and the distribution of transmitted light. Under X-rays, it shows an opalescent blue fluorescence.” The bluish-white 34.48-carat diamond measures five-eighths of an inch across and 12 diamond-shaped faces.

For years it was on display at the Smithsonian, after which it was returned to West Virginia and was exhibited intermittently at the State Fair of West Virginia.

The Jones family owned the diamond until the early 1980s when it was auctioned through Sotheby’s of New York. According to a recent uncited account at Wikipedia, the gem was sold to an agent representing a lawyer in an undisclosed east Asian country.

Vanished. Gone. Probably cut up and never to be seen again. But still, how did it end up along a stream in the mountains of West Virginia?

“Alluvial diamond” is the term used to describe diamonds that have been removed from the primary source, by erosion over millions of years, and deposition in a new environment such as a river bed, an ocean floor, or a shoreline. It’s also possible that someone might have dropped the rock or left it there. Native Americans benefitted from transcontinental trade routes, and archaeologists note that gems have been found in prehistoric burials, though never has the discovery of such a gem as the Punch Jones Diamond otherwise been documented.

Will we ever really know the truth of the Jones Diamond?

I think not and it is all part of Mysterious America. ,