Pyromorphite (classic material)

Item Description

Pyromorphite is a well-known and highly popular secondary ore mineral. It has been admired by collectors around the world for centuries. This love of the species is due to the fact that Pyromorphite is highly colorful, and found in numerous world localities in fine display specimens. Then you throw in the fact that the crystals are just plain beautiful. The famous Bunker Hill Mine was an important lead-zinc-silver deposit that produced some of the finest Pyromorphite specimens from any locality in the Western Hemisphere. The mine operated for a century (closing forever in 1988), and fine quality specimens such as this one are now quite difficult to obtain on the market, especially roughly 40 years after it came out of the ground. This piece came from a discovery in the late 1970s-early 1980s and features beautiful, fine quality, lustrous, sharp, well-formed, greenish-yellow to slightly golden-orange colored hexagonal prisms of Pyromorphite measuring up to 4 mm sitting on matrix Great condition all over, with no major damage that I can see. Classic material from Idaho, you don't see it around anymore, and the best pieces from Bunker Hill are among the best Pyromorphites in the world.
Formerly in the collection of Buck Keller, who died in 2013, and obtained from John Hoffman who sold the collection on behalf of Buck's widow, Cindy.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 9506; 41.7.2.1 ID.6. George (born August 16, 1942) is a well-known mineral collector from Washington, DC and South Carolina respectively, and was a patent lawyer by trade for over 50 years. He assembled one of the great mineral collections in the U.S., comprising worldwide specimens, and in later years he sold the worldwide specimens to focus on minerals of the United States, specifically locality suites with an emphasis on amazing representation of species while still maintaining fine quality. The specimens remarkably range from micros to all the way up to large cabinets in size. We recently acquired most of his impressive 9000+ piece collection, and the VAST majority of these pieces will be offered here in the auctions, as we feel that everyone deserves and equal opportunity at acquiring these important, well-documented and fine quality specimens for their collections.
See: https://mineralogicalrecord.com/biographies_labels/george-loud for more information