Maine Tourmaline: The Schoolboys Who Found America's First Gem Mine

America's first gem mine was not found by a prospector, a geologist or a mining company. It was found by two young students out for a walk. In the autumn of 1820, Elijah Hamlin and Ezekiel Holmes were coming down a wooded hillside near Paris, Maine, when a flash of green light caught Hamlin's eye — glinting from the earth held in the roots of a tree the wind had torn over. The crystal turned out to be tourmaline, and the hill, Mount Mica, went on to become what is widely called the first gem mine in the United States, worked on and off from the 1820s right up to the present day.

It is one of our favourite stories in all of gem history, partly because it is so gloriously undramatic. No expedition, no fortune-hunters, no royal decree — just two curious young men, a lucky slant of evening light, and a state that turned out to be sitting on some of the finest tourmaline in the world. Here is how it happened, and where the story went next.

An autumn evening and a flash of green

The fullest account of the discovery comes from Augustus Hamlin — Elijah's son — who set it down in his 1895 book The History of Mount Mica. As he tells it, the two had spent the day rambling near Paris, in Oxford County, and were heading home at sunset when Elijah paused on a knoll to admire the view. That was when the green gleam flashed at him from the upturned roots of a fallen tree. He picked out a fragment of transparent green crystal, and the pair scratched around in the fading light for more until darkness stopped them.

They resolved to come back at first light. Nature had other ideas: that very night a storm blanketed the hill in snow, and the snow stayed. The two had to wait out an entire Maine winter wondering what was under it. When they finally returned in the spring, the melt had done them a favour, washing the ledge clean — and by Augustus Hamlin's account they came away with more than thirty crystals in greens, reds, whites and yellows, of a beauty that startled them both. Specimens eventually reached Professor Benjamin Silliman at Yale, who put a name to the mystery mineral: tourmaline, a gem then barely known in America.

How a hillside became America's first gem mine

Digging began at Mount Mica in 1821, which is why the site is so often credited as the first gem mine in the United States — decades before the famous gem rushes out west, and more than a century before anyone was pulling diamonds out of a ploughed field in Arkansas. The early workings were modest, more enthusiastic scratching than industry. The serious era began in 1868, when Augustus Hamlin — a Civil War surgeon with a lifelong mineral obsession — took up his father's hill in earnest, opening pocket after pocket of gem crystals and eventually buying the property outright.

What makes Mount Mica remarkable is not one great strike but sheer persistence. The deposit is a pegmatite — a coarse-grained rock formed from the last, water-rich dregs of cooling magma, which is exactly the environment where large gem crystals grow. Miners have followed its pockets for over two hundred years, and the quarry has produced gem tourmaline intermittently into the present century. Very few gem localities anywhere on Earth can claim a working life that long.

The Hamlins: from a toppled tree to the White House

The discovery also wove one family permanently into American gem history. Elijah's youngest brother was Hannibal Hamlin, born and raised on Paris Hill within sight of Mount Mica, who went on to serve as Abraham Lincoln's first vice president, from 1861 to 1865. And Hannibal was no bystander: by one delightful account, in 1822 he and his brother Cyrus — both scarcely in their teens — borrowed blasting tools and set off a crude charge at the hill, opening the first cavity in the solid ledge. Which means a future vice president of the United States did some of the earliest blasting at America's first gem mine.

The family's monument, though, belongs to Augustus. Mayor of Bangor, surgeon, mineralogist and Mount Mica's devoted owner, he created the Hamlin Necklace: a gold chain hung with eighteen tourmalines and beryls from the mine, arranged as removable pendants around a central green tourmaline cut to 34.25 carats. It was a quietly radical object — American gems, in an American design, at a time when fine jewellery meant imported stones. Bequeathed to Harvard in 1934, it now rests in the university's Mineralogical and Geological Museum, keeping company with the world's most storied gems; few pieces of North American jewellery carry more history in a single strand.

Watermelon stripes and a state gemstone

Tourmaline's party trick is colour. The mineral family spans almost the entire spectrum — greens, pinks, blues, yellows, and inky blacks — and a single crystal can change colour along its length as the chemistry of the growth pocket shifts. Maine's most beloved expression of this is watermelon tourmaline: a crystal with a pink core wrapped in a rind of green, so that a polished slice looks exactly like its namesake fruit. The state is also known for a soft, cool blue-green often sold simply as mint tourmaline.

Maine made it official in 1971, when the legislature designated tourmaline as the state mineral — a full year before the deposit that would justify the honour beyond all argument was even found. And for anyone with an autumn birthday, there is a personal angle too: tourmaline is a modern birthstone for October, sharing the month with opal, which makes a Maine-style pink or watermelon stone one of the loveliest birthday gems going.

1972: the strike at Plumbago Mountain

The greatest chapter came a century and a half after the students' find, and about twenty miles away. In August 1972, a small group of Maine prospectors traced tourmaline up Plumbago Mountain in Newry and broke into crystal-lined pockets at the Dunton Quarry; within weeks they had formed the Plumbago Mining Corporation to work the discovery properly. What came out is still spoken of with awe — roughly a metric ton of gem tourmaline in pink, green and watermelon, some three and a half million carats — and it is often described as the largest gem tourmaline find in North American history. In Maine they still call it, simply, "The Big Find."

The most famous single crystal from the strike was nicknamed the "Jolly Green Giant" — a superb green elbaite standing over ten inches tall, now held in the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The Newry strike put Maine tourmaline on the world stage, and stones from 1972 still surface in fine jewellery and at auction today, usually with their provenance proudly attached.

Maine tourmaline at a glance

The lesson we take from Mount Mica is that great gem stories rarely begin with certainty. They begin with attention — a young man noticing a green flash that a thousand other walkers would have missed. Two centuries later, the crystals themselves grow rather differently: today a gem-quality diamond can be grown in a laboratory in a matter of weeks, with no winter's wait and no luck required. At Signora, that is the path we have chosen — every piece we make is set with lab-grown diamonds, IGI-certified with the report number laser-inscribed on the girdle, and made to order in our Surat workshop before shipping to the US, UK and Canada with duties prepaid. But the spirit is the same one that sent two students back up a snowbound hill in the spring of 1821: the conviction that a beautiful stone, honestly found and honestly told, is worth the patience. If that spirit speaks to you, our engagement rings are where most of our own stories begin.