California ignores early lepidolite discoveries

October 22, 6:52 PMJewelry ExaminerLorraine Yapps Cohen

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          Lepidolite rough specimens, a pearly pale violet mica

It was the late 1870s. Gemstones were discovered in the hills of San Diego. The discovery paled in comparison to the gold rush that came a few decades earlier in California. Among the lovely minerals was lepidolite, a pearly pale violet mica that contains lithium.

The most significant U.S. source of lepidolite is in Southern California. Lepidolite deposits occur in the Pala region of the coastal hills, about 45 miles north of the city of San Diego. Near Julian and the Banner Pass, this area yielded gold discoveries in the 1840s. In a region where coastal mountains drop five thousand feet to the Sonoran Desert, rains falling on uplifted ground washed gemstone and precious minerals out from their rocky bonds.

Lepidolite was discovered around 1884 by Charles Russell Orcull, a botanist from Vermont looking neither for lithium nor gold in the scenic San Diego hills. Despite a stronger interest in mountain flora, Orcull collected mineral specimens as well. He sent them to Dr. Kunz in New York City (for whom the related mineral, kunzite, was named), who recognized Orcull’s specimens as tourmaline, and pronounced the entire find as a rich mineral discovery.

At the time, the stones were shown to San Diego jewelers, who pronounced them pretty, but weren’t all that impressed. Even today, lepidolite is not a favored gemstone among jewelers. If there’s any preference at all, it’s for tourmaline, which has the violet color along with greens, yellows and burgundy colors. It’s solid and harder than lepidolite, with none of the flakey layers of mica.

Richard F. Pourade, author of The History of San Diego, Gold in the Sun (Copley Press, 1965), describes just how much California ignored the gemstone resource in its own backyard.

“The tourmaline, spodumene, rock-crystals, and other gems--as familiar now to experts and collectors as gold itself--have been better known to residents of Russia, Spain, or Germany than to the inhabitants of the Golden State whence they came. It is a singular fact that these gems are better represented in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the United States National Museum of Washington, the British Museum in London, the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle of Paris, and other great institutions in the East and abroad, than they are in the State Mining Bureau of California or the State University at Berkeley.”

It's interesting to note that it took two Easterners to recognize the gemstone bounty of the West, while the state in which it occurred remained sleepy about its own assets. 

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