Number 8 is the turquoise every collector can name on sight and almost nobody can buy fresh. The mine sits in the Lynn district on the west side of the Tuscarora Range in Eureka County, Nevada, and it started life as a gold and copper prospect. The turquoise was the thing they found along the way.
The first claim went in during 1929, filed by Earl Buffington and Lawrence Springer, and after that the mine passed through most of the significant names in Nevada turquoise: Ted Johnson, Doc Wilson, Myron Clark, Lee Hand, the Edgar brothers and Dowell Ward. The Edgars and Ward were the big producers.
The material is famous for its matrix. Number 8 runs sky blue to blue green with a bold spiderweb through it in golden brown, red or black, and the black and red webbing is what people pay for. It is one of the few turquoises where the host rock is more of the appeal than the stone.
The single best-known find came out on 23 June 1954, when T. G. Edgar, J. M. Edgar and Marvin Symes took out a piece of turquoise and matrix thirty three inches long, eighteen and a half wide and seven thick. Cleaned and polished it weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. That is not a specimen, that is furniture.
And then it stopped. The mine closed in the 1970s and the ground was absorbed into large-scale gold mining on the Carlin trend. The company that holds it does not mine the turquoise and does not lease the turquoise rights, which is the whole reason prices for old Number 8 material have gone where they have.
So this is a pin for a closed mine on private industrial ground. Do not drive up to it. Every genuine Number 8 stone on the market came out of the ground before roughly 1976, and there is no more coming.
Turquoise
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