Danburite
specimen number:
1052724
location:
Russell, St. Lawrence Co., New York, USA
description: The Russell danburite locality, situated near the town of Russell in St. Lawrence County, New York, is an iconic American mineral site renowned for producing massive, highly sharp, and exceptionally large prismatic crystals of danburite. Geologically, these calcium borosilicate crystals occur within elongate calc-silicate pods and coarse-grained vein-dykes nested inside the Precambrian Grenville marble formation of the Adirondack Lowlands. These unique mineralized pockets formed during the high-grade regional metamorphism of the Shawinigan Orogeny roughly 1160 million years ago, when volatile-rich, boron-bearing fluids interacted with the host marble at extreme metamorphic temperatures approaching 700 degrees Celsius, allowing the deep reddish-brown to pinkish-tan danburite crystals to grow up to ten inches in length alongside diopside, quartz, phlogopite, and calcite. Historically, the locality was first discovered in the late 1870s by the prolific regional mineral collector Chester D. Nims, with the distinctive crystals formally analyzed and described by George Brush and Edward Salisbury Dana shortly thereafter. Because the site was worked strictly as a surface specimen-quarrying locality by independent collectors rather than an active industrial ore mine, it saw sporadic, non-commercial seasonal digging from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century until the classic calc-silicate pods were largely exhausted. Dr. Hugo Francke (1860-1933) was a prominent German mineralogist, chemist, and dealer based in Dresden who operated during the golden age of European mineral collecting. He is perhaps best known in the scientific community for having the rare sulfosalt mineral franckeite named in his honor in 1893 by the mineralogist Alfred Stelzner, following Francke's involvement with silver-tin ores from Bolivia. As a dealer, Francke was noted for his high-level scientific approach, often providing specimens to major university museums and private polymaths across Europe and North America. His catalogs from the late 19th century were highly regarded for their mineralogical accuracy, and his business was a key competitor to other major German houses of the era, such as those in Bonn or Berlin. Francke's labels are typically characterized by neat, formal German script or printing, often including the chemical formula and precise locality data, which was a hallmark of the Dresden school of mineralogy. After his death in the early 1930s, much of his remaining stock and personal research materials were absorbed into larger institutional collections, but specimens bearing his original provenance remain highly prized by historical collectors for their reliable documentation and academic quality.
Classic old specimen from New York with lustrous prismatic contacted crystals of danburite measuring to 3.5 cm in size on matrix. The specimen comes with an antique label as shown at the end of the video. The label gives an original acquisition date in 1907.
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