Amber Listserv / inquiry on source in Illinois?

[ADAM SPIEGEL]

Very interesting.  The flourite mines of Southern Illinois are world famous for producing the best specimens for decades.  Now China is the biggest producer.  The flourite from Illinois came in dozens of colors, and many museums have specimens.  The coal mines down there are similar to the ones which I collect in, the Mazon Creek area.  There is no mention of amber ever being found at Mazon Creek or its environs.  The plants of the area in the Pennsylvanian time frame were ferns, horsetails, club mosses, and similar.  Not resin producing plants.  
   
  A few months ago I was doing a rock and gem show in Gurnee, Illinois.  Someone came by and claimed their son had found a large piece of amber from a Lake Michigan beach near the Wisconsin border.  I told them it would be unique, and asked them to bring it in the next day.  They never did, although they said they would.  I think it was probably just a chunk of wax or plastic or something from a dump in Lake Michigan.
   
  Adam

Andrea Paysinger <asenji at earthlink.net> wrote:
    I find this rather odd.  My grandfather owned coal mines, in the 1920s and 30s, in southern Illinois and Kentucky, near Rosiclaire and south and west of there toward Golconda.  The substrate of the Shawnee Hills region is part of the Pennsylvanian age, early Carboniferous 325 to 300 million years ago, and is soft coal, (bituminous) often sandwiched between layers or capped with limestone.  He also owned "spar" mines (fluroite) in the same area.  
  My grandfather and two of his brothers who were involved with the management of the mines, had thousands of samples from each of the mines, including "splits" that held the outline of vegetation such as reeds, fern leaves, and while there were trees, this was essentially a very hot swampy area where soft-bodied plants grew rapidly and sunk into the water and were preserved instead of rotting.  I don't think the type of trees that produced the resin that turned into amber would have flourished in the region.  
  I know my grandfather was familiar with amber because he had travelled in the Baltic before WWI and had purchased quite a lot of amber that he took home to England and had made into jewelry for his mother and his first wife.  (He emigrated to America in 1919)
  The miners who worked in the mines would get a cash bonus for finding anything unusual.
  I am pretty sure that if amber was there, it would have been found during the period the mines were actively worked by humans.  Much later, long after my family's involvement, the areas were strip-mined, a practice that my grandfather considered criminal.  
  He also had hundreds, if not thousands of samples of fluroite in various colors, including a large piece known as "the blueberry pie" because of the layers of colors from opaque white to clear to deep purple-blue, and was donated to some museum when I was still a child.    
  My cousins and I played in piles of the stuff, searching for "jewels" and "silver" because one could find flecks of lead and iron pyrite in the spar.  The lead would be bright and shiny when the rocks were first split, then dull to the typical color within a few days.  It has been 60 years since that time, but some things one never forgets.
  

  Andie
  


    On Dec 19, 2006, at 11:21 AM, ADAM SPIEGEL wrote:

    Tammy (and all),
   
  If you recall, a while back someone was selling what they called amber on eBay, supposedly from the area of former coal mines in Illinois, the Mazon Creek area.  I dont know if anything ever came from that, but the Mazon Creek biota has been extensively studied, and I dont think amber has ever been found there.  Those deposits are from the Carboniferous Period.
   
  Anyway, where exactly in southern Illinois was this supposedly found?
   
  Adam Spiegel



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