Primitiva

Lee Collection

This was probably 1/4 of the collection at the time

Xtabay

I picked this up somewhere, but I was with Mitch when he snagged the 1950- 78rpm original version at public broadcasting auction.

Yma

John Morrissey

http://www.ibhof.com/morrissey.htm

http://cyberboxingzone.com/boxing/morrisey.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Morrissey

Manchester Diamond

Smithsonian Institution Photo This is a replica of the ‘Dewey Diamond,’ discovered in Manchester in 1854. This replica of the famous stone is in collection of the United States.

 

by Richard Dietrich (originally published in 1970)

The Dewey diamond, found in 1855 by a man grading one of the streets in Manchester, Chesterfield County, was the largest diamond found in the United States up to 1884. It weighed 23.75 carats in the rough and 11.6875 carats after cutting. The cut stone is a faint greenish white and has a flaw or speck in its interior. It is reported that a “diamond of the first water” was found in 1836 on the Vaucluse Gold Mine Property, Orange County. Another unnamed beautiful “blue white” diamond was reported as found in 1913 near Pounding Mill, Tazewell County. The well- known 34.6 “Punch” Jones diamond was reportedly found in Monroe County, West Virginia, which is just northeast of Rich Creek, Giles County, Virginia. Not one of these was found in its rock matrix; instead, each was found in the unconsolidated overburden.

Dietrich revises the date of the Vaucluse find to 1847 in his later Minerals of Virginia (published in 1990), and notes that Manchester is now part of Richmond. The Dewey Diamond is also known as the Manchester Diamond.

The “reportedly found” phrase is significant. A diamond may have fallen from some traveller’s pocket in Manchester, rather than be derived from local geology. Virginia has some geologic features west of Danville that might be source rocks for diamonds, but otherwise Virginia is not a likely source for such minerals. [There's probably a fascinating story behind the people who claimed to have found each diamond... and what might have really happened before the diamonds were "found."]

 

Historic Find in 1850s
Lucky Shovel Brought Up Diamond

The luckiest man who ever dug a hole in the ground in Manchester was Benjamin Moore, who stuck in his shovel and pulled out a diamond. It happened in early 1854 or in 1853 when Moore was digging into a clay hill at the corner of 9th and Perry streets. The sparkling pebble he dug up turned out to be an uncut diamond of 18 and three fourths carats.

Where it had come from, nobody ever figured out. It prob-ably wasn’t native to this area. enbedded, as it was six feet deep in clay, it might have washed down the James river thousands of years before.

Without knowing he had a valuable find, Moore kept the stone as a curiosity for awhile. Then he took it to the Richmond jewelry firm of Mitchell and Tyler, where it was identified as a diamond. Someone put a $4,000 value on it.

Capt. Samuel W. Dewey, who inspected the stone, put it to a fire test for two hours in’ a smith’s forge, and also pronounced it a diamond.

Moore sold the diamond to Capt. Dewey, reportedly for $1,500. Dewey later mortgaged it apparently in New York to a man named J. Anglist, who in turn mortgaged it for $6,000′to John Morrissey.

Morrissey became the world’s heavyweight boxing champion in 1858, and later operated a string of gambling houses in New York. What he did with the diamond isn’t known.

Dewey had copies of the diamond made for several museums.