Item #10745

$225.00
Corundum
Craig Mine, Renfrew County, Ontario, Canada

I didn\'t know much about this locality, so I googled it and found this description of the town on Wikipedia: \"Craigmont is a dispersed rural community, unincorporated place, and ghost town in Carlow/Mayo, Hastings County in Central Ontario, Canada.\" Pretty depressing! But maybe fun for a mineral collector as this town was, apparently, the largest single producer of corundum in the world for several years. The corundum was discovered in 1876 and mining was started in 1900. At its peak, 600 people lived in the town that grew up around the mine. Apparently a fire in 1913 hurt things and the town disappeared by 1921. So this piece must date from before 1921. It comes with an old label that, unfortunately, has no collector information on it. The piece measures 9 x 4.5 x 6 cm. The larger corundum is 1.4 cm tall. As most of the (limited number) of examples on mindat are dt, I imagine the other termination of this crystal is still buried in the matrix. I am tempted to trim it and see, but I decided to leave it as is, at least for now. As the location is a syenite pegmatite, the matrix itself may be interesting to some collectors.