Virginia's Hidden Treasures: The Dewey Diamond and the Fairy Stones

Ask most people to name a gem state and Virginia will not come up. Yet the Commonwealth holds two genuine treasures: the Dewey Diamond, a 23.75-carat rough found in 1854 across the James River from Richmond and celebrated in its day as the largest diamond yet discovered in the United States, and the fairy stones of Patrick County — naturally cross-shaped staurolite crystals so beloved that Virginia named a state park after them. One is a vanished gem with a story full of showmen and prize-fighters; the other is a humble brown mineral you can still pick up off the ground today. Together they make Virginia one of the quietest, loveliest gem stories in America.

A hill in Manchester, 1854

The diamond turned up in the most unglamorous way imaginable. In 1854, a labourer named Benjamin Moore was levelling ground in Manchester — then an independent town on the south bank of the James, now part of Richmond — at what is today the corner of Ninth and Perry Streets. Six feet down in the clay he turned up a curious pebble, described in early accounts as faintly greenish, that was unusually hard and oddly heavy for its size.

Moore carried his find to a Richmond jewellery firm, Mitchell & Tyler, who confirmed it was a diamond — a rough of 23.75 carats — and reportedly appraised it at $4,000, a serious fortune in the 1850s. Newspapers seized on the story, and the stone was hailed as the largest diamond yet found in the United States, a title it would keep for decades. Moore, for his part, sold it for well under the appraisal — accounts put the price at $1,500 or $2,000 — to the man whose name it still carries.

Captain Dewey and a diamond's strange career

Captain Samuel W. Dewey, a Philadelphia mineralogist, was already a minor celebrity. Twenty years earlier, on a stormy night in Boston Harbour, he had rowed out to the USS Constitution and sawed the head from its wooden figurehead of President Andrew Jackson — a piece of political theatre that made him briefly famous. A man like that was never going to let a record-setting diamond sit quietly in a drawer. He is even said to have proved his purchase genuine by baking it in a blacksmith's forge for two hours, a test no modern gemmologist would recommend.

Dewey had the stone cut to remove a flaw, and the flaw very nearly won: the finished gem weighed just over 11 carats, less than half the rough — which tells you how imperfect the original was. The cutting is usually placed in New York around 1855, and often credited to Henry D. Morse, the pioneering American diamond cutter. What happened next depends on which account you trust. By one telling the polished stone was sold outright; by another it was mortgaged and never redeemed. Either way it ended up — for $6,000, in one version — with John Morrissey, the Irish-born bare-knuckle boxing champion who went on to run New York gambling houses and, improbably, to sit in the United States Congress. Morrissey is said to have had it set in a ring. After his death in 1878, the Dewey Diamond simply drops out of the record. No confirmed trace of it has surfaced since, though glass models were made — one is held by the Smithsonian Institution — a ghost of a gem, preserved in replica. It never joined the ranks of the world's most famous diamonds, but few stones have a stranger biography.

Just how rare is a Virginia diamond?

Here is the honest part: Virginia is not diamond country, and never was. Only four verified diamonds have ever been recorded within the state's borders, found across nearly eighty years.

What makes these finds so puzzling is that no diamond has ever been traced to a Virginia source rock. Geologists have examined a couple of candidates — a kimberlite pipe in Rockbridge County among them — without success; tellingly, none of the four diamonds turned up anywhere near them. The likeliest explanation is that these stones were wanderers, carried by ancient rivers from sources far away and dropped, one by one, into Virginia gravels. Unlike Crater of Diamonds in Arkansas, where visitors still pull diamonds from a genuine volcanic source, Virginia offers no field where you can reasonably hope to find one. Four stones in nearly two centuries is the whole harvest.

The fairy stones of Patrick County

Which brings us to Virginia's other treasure — the one you actually can find. In the Blue Ridge foothills of Patrick County, near the town of Stuart, small brown crystals weather out of the hillsides in the shape of crosses. Locals have carried them as good-luck charms for generations, and the legend attached to them is one of the gentlest in American folklore.

The story — and we should say plainly that it is a legend, told and retold with affection rather than as history — goes like this. Long ago, fairies lived and danced around the springs of these hills. One day a messenger arrived from a distant city bearing news of the death of Christ. When the fairies heard the story of the crucifixion, they wept — and as their tears fell to the earth, they crystallised into tiny stone crosses. The fairies are said to have vanished from the glen, but the ground where they grieved remains scattered with their tears.

The legend was cherished enough that when Virginia opened its first six state parks in 1936, the largest of them — some 4,700 acres around Fairy Stone Lake — was named Fairy Stone State Park in the crystals' honour.

Why the crosses form: a small marvel of geology

The scientific story is nearly as lovely as the legend. Fairy stones are staurolite, an iron-aluminium silicate that grows in metamorphic rock — in this case, schist that was cooked and squeezed deep underground during the ancient mountain-building that raised the Appalachians. Staurolite has an unusual habit: its crystals often grow in pairs that interpenetrate at fixed angles, a phenomenon mineralogists call twinning.

When two crystals cross at roughly sixty degrees, the result is an X — the form often called a St Andrew's cross. When they intersect at close to ninety degrees, they form the rarer and most prized shape: a true right-angled cross. The angles are not accidents. They are set by the internal geometry of the crystal lattice itself, repeated identically in stone after stone — the same quiet rule-following that makes a diamond grow as an octahedron, whether it forms in the earth over a billion years or in a growth chamber over a few weeks. Nature, it turns out, makes crosses for reasons of pure chemistry; the legend simply gave the chemistry a soul.

Hunting your own fairy stone

Fairy Stone State Park is a rarity among parks: it actually encourages visitors to hunt for its namesake mineral. At the time of writing, collecting is allowed at a designated hunt site off Route 57 near the park — the classic advice is to go after a good rain, when fresh crystals wash out of the soil, and to look low rather than deep. You may kneel down and sift the dirt with your hands, but digging tools of any kind are banned; finds are limited to a small number for personal use, and commercial collecting is prohibited. Rules can change, so it is worth checking with the park before you visit. Most fairy stones are rough, brown and well under an inch long — not gemstones in any jeweller's sense, but there is something disarming about holding a naturally formed cross that no human hand ever shaped.

We tell these stories because they remind us why people fall in love with stones in the first place — not the price tags, but the wonder. At Signora, our own diamonds are grown rather than found, made to order in Surat and IGI-certified with the report number laser-inscribed on the girdle — so unlike the poor Dewey Diamond, they can never quietly vanish from the record. If Virginia's lost gem has put you in the mood to choose one with a traceable story, our engagement rings are a gentle place to begin.