Very good Antonio!  Excellent find.  That's a sure sign that there are crystals all around your area.  Well done.

That's what is called a vug.  It's pretty much encased in solid quartz all around that crystalline area and you'll pretty much shatter it if you try to bust it open.  The best thing you could do if you wanted to make it more presentable is take it to someone that has a rock saw who could saw the rock down further and make it sit better.  Keep looking around for larger vugs or veins of crystallization and you hopefully find loose crystals in the same area.

Congratulations, Antonio, and welcome to the board!
Keep burstin' those rocks! You don't know what you might find until you look.

Great prospecting there Antonio.  That mass of quartz looks very promising.  You will be smart to investigate it and I will not be surprised if you find some nice specimens!   

Antonio,

I'm glad to know that another rockhound lives in Rockingham, NC! I've been on this board for several years now talking about Richmond County and how over-looked it is. Scott was kind enough to post some pics of some things here for me a good while back. I've sent you a PM about some sites as well. This quartz vein in the photos looks promising. They just built a new bank across the street from Food Lion here on Hwy 74 and uncovered some large quartz veins. I checked it out but only micro druzy xls at best. That same vein runs across the highway and there was a few 1/8" to 1/4" point faces on it but nothing great. My company built the Employment Security building uptown a few years ago and we pulled out one quartz boulder as large as a car that had no xls in it but did have tiny stringers of pyrite running through it. The new court house had one pulled out that they had to blast it was so big. All of this is occurring right along the Fall Line. The Fall Line counties, which Richmond is one, have turned out some great finds such as Liberty Hill, SC and various spots east of Raleigh. The pegmatites around Cordova just west of Rockingham hold allot of promise. They are part of a granitic monolith that outcrops in SE Anson and SW Richmond Counties. One good area to look in Anson County is off Hwy. 145 going to Morven from Hwy. 74. Where this road crosses Jones Creek, there are visible signs of pegmatite and I have found small garnets and nice mica xls associated with cloudy quartz xls there. There is a retired surveyor over there who knows of a creek off 145 where he found huge smokies, most incomplete but the smaller examples were glass clear with books of mica. I went there in the summer several years ago but it is very remote and snakes were everywhere. He also told me of an amethyst find over there on a chicken farm that I checked out but by the time that I found out, the farm was sold and had pines growing up in the field and it was so covered in thorn bushes that you couldn't see the ground. The main problem with both Richmond and Anson counties is the lack of construction. Rockingham has some now and then but there isn't enough in either county to expose things like say in Wake, Guilford, Catawba, etc. When they built the 74 by-pass around Rockingham some years ago I was hopeful of a find on the west side but the only thing that I found was some soapstone veins carrying ilmenite. My buddy in Anson County though did find some quartz carrying pyrite and some soapstone that was was solid enough to work with. There use to be a local guy that actually sold allot of the land that Vulcan is mining now. He was looking for "black granite" as he called it which seems to be a very dark mafic igneous rock that takes a high polish. He use to make monuments and head stones. He showed me a piece of kunzite from Richmond County once. Yes kunzite. He hit one pocket or vein of the material while digging exploratory holes for Vulcan during the 70's. The material was pale pink, opaque, and in lath-like masses embedded with feldspar, mica, and quartz. He had several peices at that time but I couldn't get him to part with a single piece of it. He died several years ago and God knows where the stuff is today. He claimed it was only found in one spot and wasn't plentiful. There are probably allot of very isolated small pockets like this of minerals all throughout the Fall-Line. I took a small group of folks into Vulcan's granite quarry here several years ago. We found a few interesting things but they wouldn't let us go to the side of the quarry that I had heard that many years earlier a worker hit a pocket of ruby and sapphire corundum. This find brought the attention of Vulcan geologist who came down and determined that it was a freak isolated pocket and upon extraction found no more and preceded to blast. I have had three "old-timers" who worked in the quarry from that time period confirm this story. My ex-wifes brother lived only a few miles from the quarry and use to ride 4-wheelers all throughout the area. One day, he and several others drove through the woods behind the quarry property and hit a dirt road that took them into the backside of the old pit. This was on a Sunday and the mine was closed. AS they were riding through, he noticed a fold out table and some chairs sat up behind a dump truck with rock picks on the ground. He got off to see what was going on and saw several large chucks of rock that contained slender blue elongated crystals. He wasn't a rock hound and cared nothing about rocks at the time but told me that they were glassy and looked like "blue glass pencils!" Not caring, he got on his 4-wheeler and left. He told me this story many years later when he realized that I liked rocks. This story is interesting because of several reasons. Prior to hearing his story, I was in the mountains at a local Spruce Pines rock shop where the owner asked where I was from. I told him and he immediately asked if I knew where "Yates Hill was?" Yates Hill is a community that borders the Vulcan Quarries north pit where my ex-brother-in-law saw the "blue pencils". Now....the store owner went on to tell me that years prior there was a man who worked on the railroad who had found blue tourmaline in matrix there at an old mica mine. This was the first I'd heard of such from here but I remembered my grandfather who grew up in that area telling me about an old "isinglass" pit in the woods there. He said as a boy that he would go there and get pieces and cut it to make stove windows. I never took the story serious at the time but then started hearing other talk about the old mica mine and then the "blue pencils" at the quarry. Years past and I'd forgotten the stories until one day I had a visit from two old and now deceased collectors from Hendersonville. They were retired Yankees who had a brother-in-law living in a rest home in Rockingham and came to visit him once a year. We learned of each other and for several years, we would get together, have supper and spend a day collecting in the county. On this particular visit, i couldn't go out the last day because I had a bad stomach virus. They went to the Vulcan quarry and asked permission to look and were granted and found a few odds and ends but on there way out, a worker told them to go see a man who lived on the edge of the quarry property because Vulcan was trying to buy him out and he had found some "odd rocks". They went there and found the old guy and sure enough, he was finding blue tourmaline in quartz in his garden! He had several pieces and actually gave the gentlemen a piece. Well, as my luck would have it, I wasn't told this until my next visit with my mountain friends a year later and we all went back over there and the property had been bull-dozed, the house gone and Vulcan had posted the whole area! We walked down a new dirt road that Vulcan had made that lead into the backside of the pit and did actually find a quartz/mica vein that someone had been hand cobbing. We inspected the quartz and found that it contained impressions where some elongated striated crystals had been "popped" out of the matrix by the person(s) who clearly dug the vein for this purpose. We found one tiny shard of quartz with remnant blue tourmaline and started to dig. Not long, here comes two Vulcan workers who very sternly asked us to leave. We did. I went back to the dirt road a week later and was surprised to find a gate and posted signs everywhere! Even more, they had a motion activated camera set up on a pole at the entrance! So I gave up that. All of these events lead me to conclude that indeed there was a forgotten mica mine and that there were a small series of pegmatites present that had blue tourmaline in them but today, every ounce of this property is owned by Vulcan and when I visited the quarry a few years ago, i asked to explore that side and was told no. Rockhounding is hard enough but when your up against these odds, its even harder. There are important minerals and gems in Richmond County I'm sure but they have been kept locked away behind private property for the most part for years and the lack of large construction and development in what is a rural area of our state further hinders uncovering these minerals but they are there and surely will be found one day I hope and brought about for the rockhound community to see!      

Antonio,

After emailing with you and learning a little more about where you live, that particular area of the county has produced smoky quartz crystals before but the veins are very isolated and run mostly through private property. You are sitting in a leg of the Jonesboro Fault and the geologic maps show that your geology consist of medium range metamorphic rocks consisting of phyllite, mica schist, and intrusive veins of quartz and granitic rock. In your area, the exposure of these soils is only 1 to 3 miles in width but travels northeast for considerable distance along several prominent creeks. Being so close to the fall-line, you don't go far before the area switches back into coastal plain sediments that have overlaid the area. Like I say, I know there are smoky quartz xls just to your north and have heard of one being found near you. I'd definitely look your area good as every report that I know of coming out of your area has not been by rockhounds out looking just for minerals rather by hunters or solely by accident. So hey....a trained eye might really find something. Keep looking Antonio.

Antonio,

We built a house in Roberdel some years ago and I will never forget that the whole house sat upon one massive quartz vein. It was on a hill overlooking Hitchcock Creek and no matter where you dug, there was solid white quartz there. We had to blast and saw cut and never reached soil. The ground looked like snow with all the quartz. Seems like it was off Terry Bridge Road. That house isn't going anywhere, lol! But in the thousands of boulders that I inspected, I only found a few decent small xls, they were glass clear but very small. There wasn't much vug space to allow growth unfortunately. There are several roads right in there that cross the heart of that geologic belt but following Hitchcock Creek is key to it all. I knew a fellow once that panned Hitchcock creek and found a little color. He brought it by my workplace to show me along with a bucket of dirt but I was much more interested in all the shards of smoky and rose colored quartz, mica, and other rocks that were present. I think the key to finding smoky or really good crystals period in your area will be to look for contact zones between the quartz and the granitic rocks. At Millstone, the smokies seemed to be coming from a series of thin quartz veins that cut through granite and quartz monozite. There are several good exposures of it visible near the cabins at Camp Millstone 4-H camp. They don't allow collecting there but you can see veins of gemmy smoky running through the soil and there are veins present in some of the large granitic boulders but beware *** this is a snake paradise with all the large boulders and cascading waterfalls. Twice, I have almost stepped on rattlers around these rocks. They love to hide under and around them. The main farm that I have collected at over there is just west of the camp along another creek that feeds into the one at Camp Millstone. The creeks seem to follow the path of the only exposures of rock in the area and the further you get away from the creeks the more sand and loamy the soil gets. I've always suspected that panning the creeks thoroughly would be wise although in the Summer months, very dangerous due to snakes. One of the few smokies that I found was found on the underside of a quartz boulder lying in the creek bank. The classic source for the smokies with the schrol inclusions was the field above the creek which sat right in a meander of the creek itself. When the farmer would plow this one end of the field, he would find these dark black smokies with schrol needles shot all through them but with age, he stopped plowing that field and eventually, it became a pine forest that was cultivated then not replanted and today is full of scrub oaks, small pines, and many, many thorns. It is virtually impossible to penetrate. I was in there about 2 years ago and found some massive smoky and a few faced pieces along the creek but it was on hot day and I didn't try to push myself much. Anyway, as you can tell, I get long winded so I'll wrap this up by saying.....follow those creeks....they are key to your area. Good luck!