ep. 18 The Largest Gold Nugget Ever Found in CA

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No doubt you have seen those tiny bottles for sale for like 5 bucks and inside are a few flakes of gold, and maybe you think to yourself, was gold mining like this? Did people really get all excited for a tiny little flake they saw in the water? In this episode, I will be covering the largest known gold nuggets ever found.

1. Gold Quartz

   Just as the name would suggest, its when you find crystalline gold in and around some quartz. It’s pretty to look at and very rare to find

   

2. Crystalline Gold

   Which is fairly rare as well because a crystalline gold nugget would be pure gold with no other rocks attached

   

3. Gold Crystal

   Similar to crystalline but are more crystally looking.

   

4. Placer Gold

   Which is all other kinds of gold you might find. usually wrapped or attached to other rocks.

   

   If you look up the largest gold nugget found in California you will be given one of 2 nuggets. One is known as The Fricot Nugget, which is the largest crystalline gold nugget ever found weighing in at 13.8 pounds. The other was a placer gold nugget weighing in at 109.2 pounds.

   The biggest in the world was over in Australia, they found a gold nugget that weighed in at 210 pounds

   let’s go over all 3.

Fricot Nugget

The Fricot Nugget was found in El Dorado County in Spanish Diggins at the Grit Mine, by Mr. Davis in 1865. It was found about 200 feet down because it was crystalline, not a placer, they sent it to New York where it was sold to a guy named Mr. Fricot. who happened to have lived in Grass Valley oddly enough. It was a showpiece and traveled the world and now is at the mining and mineral museum in Mariposa.

Monumental Nugget

The Monumental Nugget was found at the Sierra Butte Mine at the 8th level in the mine back in 1869. I wasn’t able to find out if it was still around or if it got melted down but you can find a fake one at the Kentucky Mine Museum which I have been to and highly recommend checking out. The picture is of the fake one.

Welcome Stranger

The Australian gold nugget was called, Welcome Stranger, and it originally weighed 241 pounds. The extra rock that was stuck to it was trimmed off which made it go down to 210 lbs. This gold oddly enough was found only an inch underground found in Victoria back in 1869. This thing was too big to be weighed and since they were just going to melt it down anyway it was broken into a few pieces and melted into a bunch of ingots (which is a block) then shipped off to England.