I didn’t go to Tucson this year for the gem shows. My supply of rough was winding down as well as my supply of gem material, so Lora and I made reservations at a cabin tucked away in a holler just outside of Franklin, NC. Although Lora is originally from the tar heal state, she had never been to one of these gem shows in Franklin either. We have visited some of the mines there, and we have a favorite gem shop there at the Franklin Gemstone Warehouse. But, the Franklin Gem Shows were very new to us.
First, a Little Background on the Area
- Western North Carolina was where folks that wanted to live a totally oppression free life during the colonial days went to pioneer.
- It is home of the highest mountains of the Appalachians.
- The Irish and Scotts who were shipped over to the colonies to act as militia for the Brittish, scurried to the tips of these of mountains as soon as they got off the boat.
- Then my girlfriend’s, Lora Lunsford, had a relative, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who climbed down from the mountain and brought the claw hammer banjo style of these ancient reclusive people to Nashville on a silver platter.
- Tiffany and Company mined this area for rubies, emeralds, garnets, and tourmies for years. Some of these old mines were sold to individuals and are open to the public for fee mining. Tiffany still has a few quiet mines in the area, according to rumors. But, any mine that is found right alongside the road is not a real mine. These are for kids. To find the real mines you have to ask around a bit.
- Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and several other 50’s and 60’s artists, climbed these mountains at the Black Mountain College in the 40’s and 50’s and gave us a truly unique American art style.
- Now, the area has networks to keep artists and artisans in business, supplying rich tourists with goodies using a very old cottage industry type of system.
You can’t swing a dead cat in Asheville, NC without hitting someone who makes their living off of making stuff, whether it is jewelry, baskets, paintings, or pluckings on an old banjo. It has been very tempting to move there myself and set up shop, but after we thought about it for a while, why go to where the market is so saturated? It is kind of nice being one of very few artisan jewelers in Birmingham, Alabama. But, boy oh boy, it is a beautiful area. Maybe when I retire I will get me a cabin in those thar hills, where the grandkids can run barefoot till they are true tar heals.
Scurrying about these small cities surrounding Franklin, getting directions is a challenge. We would pull into a gas station/art gallery and I would mosey in and declare that I have never been here before, could you please give me directions to an ATM machine.
“Do you know where Arbys used to be? Take a left there, and then…”
“Ummm, I’ve never been here before.”
“Do you know where the little blue building on the right is? Turn there onto…”
“Let’s assume that I am from another country, and I need to find an ATM machine, OK?”
“Take a right out of the parking lot, and… Do you know where the third stop light is?…”
LOL, take a map, as many as you can find, because they will all be different with the winding roads going up and down mountain passes, I have not found one map that accurately depicts the area, and a compass is useless, because you can head west on a road and 2 minutes later you are going East in the same direction on the same road.
The Gem Shows
There are three different types of shows going on at these types of gem shows. The first is the wholesale show. You have to register to get in. This was initially to protect real wholesale buyers from having their customers being able to buy products that they should be buying from the retailers, a bead shop for instance. This used to be where bead shops would go through and buy inventory and offer it for a great price to the artists. But, now the artists have tax IDs and go to the shows direct. So, these are actually retail shows with a secret wholesale market going on under these onesy, twosy shoppers’ noses. I heard many bead artists complain that the prices were higher than they could buy at a bead shop. We just snickered; unless you are going to drop $1000 per vendor, you might as well have stayed home. Not to be mean, but the wholesalers want you to support your local bead shops. If the bead shops go out of business, so will they. A vendor that offers their customers the same value as they are to get is a dead source. You might as well hang a “going out of business” sign on those vendors. I did manage to get some very good deals on rubies and emeralds, but I tagged them onto Lora’s purchases for the shop. I spent $400, but tagged it onto Lora’s $12000 worth of orders.
The Retail Shows
I have no idea who these shows were marketed to. But, if you are interested, I will try my best to describe. One vendor will have something that everyone talks about. A few years ago it was these large amethyst geode looking things covered in what looks like JB weld on the outside. They were cheap. One vendor had pulled up with a truckload of them, but every vendor had a table of them. Actually, every vendor has tables of all the same things. Whatever was a hit five years ago is still on every vendor’s booth somewhere. Drusy cabs were in everyone’s booth. Fake pearls and turquoise, everyone had the exact same strands. Everyone had Fordite cabs, which is just paint cabbed down. Basically, whatever was popular one year, the next everyone had some of it, which makes all of these tents exactly the same. You can save yourself some time, visit the first tent and go home.
The Hounds
These are the backbone of the industry, the rockhounds. They pull up in RVs, pick-up trucks, and slice slabs on the spot. This is the real market, which you won’t find on the Franklin city commerce maps. They gather in parking lots and camp grounds and sell the real deal that they dragged out of the backwood hollers and deserts of our country. This is the quiet gem show. They don’t spend big bucks on booth fees or advertisements, lapidaries just point you to the campground and back alley where these rough, tough, and grumbly old rockhounds slice you off a hunk of Wyoming jade, sell uncut fire agates by the fistful, and sell labradorite right out of the box that they loaded onto their trucks at the docks. Great prices listed on the boxes, but if you wave cash at them, they will estimate the pounds down for you. Just don’t come in there and start asking them to cut slabs in half because you don’t want to pay a full $70 for a great slab, and then try to give them a check or ATM card. These are individuals, not wholesalers or corporations, and you may get a fist in your face. The prices are direct from the sources, if you start trying to go cheapscape on an already great “factory direct” price (right out of the dirt), you will insult the source and maybe, you will be insulting the most knowledgeable person in the field on that particular stone. This is what I was there for. I love these guys and gals. I just wish they weren’t so transient; so that if I run out of one of their slabs, I could just call them, but most live on the road, in tents in the wilderness, or out of hotel rooms across the country, doing shows.
Fakes are Everywhere
GIA doesn’t have a police force checking booths at these shows, so buyers beware. There was one booth at the wholesale show, which looked to be very corporate and was said to represent mines in Mexico. They had spent $5000 on their whole set-up, just to make $3000 on direct sales, handing out corporate brochures on the mines that they represent. I had just loved the rainbow calsilicate that I was seeing everywhere, so I picked up a chunk from them along with the info, which featured pictures of the layers of this product being pulled from the mine walls. It fooled me. When I got home I googled this new stone only to find that GIA had deemed it a fraud, it is color enhanced and stabilized. The whole scam boggles my mind, that if the gem trade has labeled this rocks a fraud, why peddle it so hard and with so much money to make people think it is the real deal. I would gladly have bought some anyways. It is a very popular stone, being real doesn’t matter much to the public as long as everyone is honest and forthcoming. If they’d just come clean on the whole process, it might even go up in price. Fordite is just paint, but people are paying upwards of $40 a pound for the stuff.
Other frauds, we saw were lab created gemstone packets being sold as real gems. Synthetic counter top material was being sliced into slabs. Glass moonstones, died howlite being sold as turquoise (Kingman mine and Sleeping Beauty no doubt). Fake coral practically dripped off of the retail booths, and fake opals littered the place. I got into an argument with one vendor who kept putting some opals in a jar in my face telling me that he had Andamooka. When I told him that obviously he missed the memo on Andamooka, explaining that the matrix doesn’t turn black till you boil it in sulfuric acid after it is lapped; he just turned to the next potential victim and started his pitch again.
One guy who ran a booth at the civic center was this clean cut guy, who looked like an ex Chicago city postman. He was wearing an optivisor and allowing customers to pick out a stone, and then they he would set it for them in one of his many boxes of pre-made settings. He had these dark green stones that were labeled “moldavite.” I heard one customer ask what it was, and he replied, “It’s a spiritual stone that the metaphysical folks just love. I think it grows in the hills of Alabama.”
He he, I was reminded of the visit to my shop by the moldavite scammers. I wondered how many karats, carats, or carrots that he was scammed into buying. I picked one up to check it out in the loop, and sure enough it was Alabama moldavite, or slag from iron processing that people can find along any railroad track here. It was used as a ballast rock when they laid the rails. And, besides the experts tell us that real moldavite came from a cataclysmic impact by a meteorite, which is way more interesting of a story than what the postman in the optivisor was telling the crowd. I also watched him patiently wait on the customer to pick out a stone, and then he would switch the stone with one that fit the setting that the customer wanted. LOL, why even allow them to pick one out?
All in All
It was a lot of fun. Just as in Tucson, it is an excellent opportunity to meet folks that can supply you with the materials that you need and want, the camaraderie with people in the field is excellent, and the gems were beautiful. Shows are the only place for someone like me, who uses stone, to be able to look at what he is buying before breaking out the wallet. There are no other options in my area. But, keep in mind that you are not going to get the best deals in the world buying onesy and twosies of things, and BUYER BEWARE!!!
We also dined at some of the greatest (eclectic cuisine) restaurants that one of the little college cities had to offer and it was amazing. The people are wonderful in this part of the world, and our cabin was just what was needed after a day of hauling rocks and Lora’s tons of beads around in the rain; no cell phone, no TV, nor internet, but a personal sauna, hot tub, and peace and quiet, with a drizzling rain just outside our cabin window.
Ultimately, I would love to one day visit one of these gem shows where the mentality is to offer quality over pricing. I am not sure a business that looks for deals on crap over just looking for the best materials to make their works from is a benefit. And, I am not talking about diamonds and platinum; I mean quality slabs, beads, and colored stones. “Make it and they will come,” to quote that baseball movie. Swamping us with junk, crap slabs that someone picked up in a buy out, is not giving us much of an assortment to look through. The ideal gem show should have the customers, wholesale and jewelry artists alike, all asking to see the best materials that the vendor has. Then if the vendor cannot produce some fantastic cuts in colored stones or slabs, the best Tahitian pearls, or true quality turquoise, then they should feel ashamed. Instead, when you ask for the best, you get junk plopped down in front of you at good prices, but shameful materials to try to make things out of. These shows might be a plethora of materials for the up and coming artists, but it is depressing for someone who might want to take the opportunity to pick up some great material that he can see before buying, and is willing to pay the price. The shows are an awesome opportunity for quality merchandise to be gathered, but unfortunately the square, penny ante crowd has driven this show into a huge thrift store of mediocre at best to fraudulent materials.
(Run-on sentences, typos, and incorrect grammar will prevail here. Please excuse the mess. These will all be cleared up before I send it to the publishers, once the book deal is done, LOL)
