For half a century, in a brick building that once served as Franklin’s jailhouse, gems and minerals from around the world have been on display. Countless visitors during those five decades have passed through the doors of the Gem and Mineral Museum at 25 Phillips Street. One of the major attractions of the museum is a Cowee Valley ruby weighing 2.3 pounds. While thousands have admired its beauty and rarity, few realize Cowee Valley, and the gems that were mined there, have a very long and intriguing history.
The rubies found in Macon County are a child of the corundum family. The other child of the corundum family is the sapphire. Corundum rubies are comprised primarily of aluminum oxide, contributing to their significant weight, as well as traces of chromium, titanium, vanadium, and iron. It is these transition metal impurities that give the ruby its crystalline structure, and the chromium that gives it the red color that fluoresces under a black light.
Macon County’s Cowee Valley has become known worldwide as an outstanding location to find corundum rubies. Much of that eminence is directly owed to Tiffany Jewelers. In the 1890s and early 1900s, representatives from the famous company came to Cowee Valley in search of corundum rubies. They had been prompted by local individuals who had found several large rubies in that area and sent them to Tiffany’s for valuation.
The Tiffany Company was followed by two major mining companies who purchased tracts of land in the valley and mined in several test shafts and mines. By the early 1900s, after years of exploration that was mostly hand-shoveled, thus labor-intensive, the Tiffany representatives and mining company heads determined there was no mother lode, and the costs of labor were exceeding the value of the discoveries, so they withdrew all mining in the Cowee Valley.
During the period the companies commercially mined in Cowee Valley, they discovered corundum was next to diamonds as the hardest substance on earth and sold the rubies and sapphires as an abrasive, primarily for sandpaper. However, by the 1910s, scientists discovered cheaper, synthetic abrasives, and Cowee Valley corundum was no longer needed as a commercial abrasive.
A 1912 U.S. Geologic Survey conducted of the area also revealed extensive corundum in the area, but could not reveal any primary sources, cementing the withdrawal of Tiffany’s and others. By 1914, the last of the commercial ventures – The Consolidated Ruby Mining Company of New York – had abandoned their efforts, again leaving the Cowee Valley to the local residents.
Mining for everyone
The land of Cowee Valley, now prized for its bucolic beauty, was once the major meeting site for the Eastern Cherokee Nation. After the 1830s, the Indian Removal Act followed by the grievous Trail of Tears, five million acres of Cowee Valley land was sold in land auctions in the 1850s and 1860s. Large tracts of land were bought up by mostly desperate black and white families seeking refuge from the Civil War. Western North Carolina was suffering a financial crisis, the end result of the Revolutionary War leftover expenses, the Civil War financial and population costs, western frontier expansion that was luring settlers out of the area, and the refusal of North Carolinians to allow any tax increases that would have built passable roads and bridges from this area to population centers.
The Cowee Valley families financially limped into the new century. During the lean days of the Great Depression, Cowee area farmers leased the rights to their creeks so that adventurers could placer mine (a panning technique). Rubies, never larger than four carats, were found along with sapphires. Cowee Valley sapphires are all colors of corundum, except red. Red means the “find” is a ruby. This type of gem hunting continued for 20 more years.
Then in 1949, after placer mining in Cowee Valley for several months, a venture capitalist started tourist mining to attract more people to the Franklin area. He paired with the old manager of the Tiffany land and agreed to split any profits. Others caught on to the trend and opened the old mines that had been opened in the early 1900s.
Over the years, they adapted their mining techniques so families and children could easily collect rocks and minerals. Today, instead of company miners seeking the primary source of corundum rubies and sapphires in efforts to get rich, amateur miners grow rich in the experience of finding local corundum rubies and sapphires in the hills of Cowee Valley.