Ben E. Clements Mineral Museum & the Episode with the Pants

After leaving Cave In Rock, Matthew and I crossed the ferry, back into KY and headed south to Marion, KY.  There were few cars on the road, but everyone and their brother brought out their farm implements to parade up and down the highway...  There were several convoys of trucks, hay cutters, (those weird things that look like multiple weed eaters on the back of a tractor), giant trucks to receive the grain, and balers, to collect and bale up the straw.  I assume they were harvesting wheat, because it looked freshly cut, while the corn, while doing well, is FAR from ripe.

Then, we got to Marion.  Time for some gas...  We filled up at the local hot spot, the gas station, and then I went in to get cold drinks and ice for the cooler.  While standing in line, hanging on to my purse, two cokes, and a bag of chips, the bag of ice leaning up against my leg, the lace tie of my pants decided to give way, suddenly, and my pants fell into a puddle around my feet.  Dismayed, I dropped it all, reached down, pulled my pants up, and quickly retied the tie, in a giant knot that couldn't get loose no matter what.  I almost ended up cutting the tie to get them off that night at the hotel...

The best part was that, despite there being 10-15 people in the convenience store, no one seemed to notice.  Or they were just being kind.  I mean, I'm not some sort of bathing beauty that anyone wants to see my legs, et. al., so I was grateful that no one noticed.  Or if they noticed, no one pointed and stared...    No small children tugged at their mother's hand and asked loudly, What's wrong with that lady's pants?

Red-faced, we went to the Ben E. Clement's Mineral Museum.  What a thrill for a geologist!  My son, too, is fascinated by the giant crystals, and there are PLENTY of them to see!

I met Mr. Clement many years ago when I was in college.  As soon as I got into the geology department I heard about him, and everyone said, "You've got to see his fluorite collection!"  Well, dear Mr. Clement had a farm near Marion, and I found it, a miracle, and he took me all around his various outbuildings, which were STUFFED with gorgeous minerals!  GORGEOUS minerals.  Mr. Clement owned a fluorspar mine-- the ore that comes from fluorite-- and had a deal with all the other fluorspar mines around that if they found any crystals, they called him, and he came and got them.  OH MY GOSH.

We walked around his property and he would twitch off a tarp covering an old wooden wagon in the barn, and it was filled to the gills with fabulous crystals...  Then, we walked around his house, and he would open up a "door" to the crawl space, reach in and heave out a giant wad of old rags and newspapers, and voila!  A giant fluorite crystal would be revealed.  It was amazing!  He had one that looked like an eagle, poised in flight...  I think this one sort of looks like a dinosaur...

Then, we went down into his basement.  His wife just rolled her eyes as we went past-- no doubt sick of hearing about fluorite-- but down there, were shelves and shelves and shelves of plain old rocks.  Mr. Clement told me, "Now watch this!"  He turned on a long-wave black light and the minerals came alive!  Fantastic colors, all neon-- yellow, green, blue, orange, red-- and then, he said, "Look at these!", and turned on a short-wave black light.  Oh my, the entire room was lit with pools of bright colors.  When he turned the lights off, the rocks still glowed from the ultraviolet lights, phosphorescing in the dark...  I was speechless...

At any rate, I visited with him several times, and he was a lovely, kind man, who appreciated my youthful agogness, and let me purchase a box of his "trash".  $20 dollars.  About 1/2 of my monthly spending money, but I felt like if I needed to, I could type term papers at $.50 page forever, if I needed spending money.  (This was in the days of the early electric typewriters, long before word processing programs, and just before calculators became in general use.)  Or sell a book or two...  Ben Clement's trash was a true treasure to me, and some of my samples are better than in many museums...  

Well, dear Mr. Clements died of old age, and his son sold ONE of his treasures to the Smithsonian for $1 million and opened up this museum.  They are now selling off parts of the collection-- the beautiful but not huge and not so special, (in his son's eyes-- priceless to me), minerals to keep the museum going.  In this day of budget cuts, no college students come by and no classes take field trips there...  I guess the education systems are cutting science classes, which makes me ill!

This is a giant octahedron of fluorspar.  In other words, the crystal was cleaved to produce this double pyramid of fluorite.  You can see the cleavage planes, which are the shiny planes within the rock, but the original crystal must have been huge.

Fluorite grows in cubes, and breaks into octahedrons, just like diamonds do.  Fluorite is highly water soluble, I was amazed that this crystal was a octahedron, which means the original crystal was even larger.

The next few pictures are back lit-- fluorspar comes in all colors, most commonly purple, but also, pink, blue, green, yellow and white.  Some crystals are bi- and tri-colored.  It occurs naturally with calcite, and also aragonite, sphalerite, ilmenite, galena, and many other mineral types, and is often banded.

This is a giant yellow fluorite crystal that is backlit, so you can see both the color and a bit of the natural banding that frequently occurs in fluorite crystals.

Fluorite is deposited when hot water, from geothermal sources, rich in fluorite, crystallize in cracks and crevices.  The fluorspar district, in and around Marion, has been highly faulted, and evidently, somewhere down there, magma intruded, heating the water to super high temperatures.  As the water slowly cooled, it deposited these fabulous minerals in the cracks and crevices.

Rarely does the superheated water reach the surface, as when it does, it boils away.  It would leave some kind of deposit on the surface, because the water is so mineralized, but these beautiful crystals formed very deeply, where the heat was high, and the pressure was great enough to keep the water from boiling away of becoming steam.

I dont' know about y'all, but I think this is beautiful!  There are some really large, bowl shaped crystal "chambers" that resemble Merlin's Crystal Cave, to me, anyway.  This is backlit fluorite and it reveals the beautiful purple color.  There are spots, although I couldn't find my best spots, and the mines have all closed, where fluorite has permeated the limestone and the limestone is purple.  Alas, my memory of 40+ years ago is faulty, and I had no idea where to look, or which direction to head in.  I needed a map of the old mines...  Maybe I could have found them then-- but we were in a hurry to get on the road-- we had to get to Missouri that night!

Various backlit pieces showing the beautiful colors of fluorite.  Just think, from fluorspar, this mineral is in fluorescent lamps, fluoride toothpaste, etc.  

The mines down there opened during WWII, when they were using the fluorspar to make some kind of hexofluoro--- something, for the atomic bombs.  They operated for many years, dominating the world market.

Now, other countries can mine the mineral more cheaply, so other countries produce fluoride, and all the mines of the area are closed.  No matter, we still have a lot of the deposits left, if we need them.

Nothing special about these rocks, right?

Well, turn on the short wave and long wave ultraviolet lights and see how a bee sees them!

OH my gosh!

Bees and some spiders, (and they wonder about deer), can see ultraviolet light, as well as the regular old light we see...  I can bet that these rocks drive bees and spiders nuts...  Aren't they beautiful?

This concludes our pictorial tour of the Ben E. Clement's Mineral Museum in Marion, KY.  I hope you had fun, and if you are ever near the area, it is certainly worth a look-see!

We left Marion, and began the looong drive to Missouri-- but more about that later...

Thanks for coming by!