ELLERBE — More than 100 mini-prospectors poured into Ellerbe on Saturday to try their luck at seining for gemstones. Whoops and hollers, and earnest nudges signaled their success.
The event was the first public exposure for the new water flume — also called a sluice — at the Rankin Museum of American Heritage, which mounts static displays of Americana inside dark, quiet rooms.
Saturday’s event, though, was anything but static, with four groups of 30 children from age 3 up seining for treasure and crying out, “Mama, look at this!”
Robert Nelson, 11, found “a bunch of lapis, fool’s gold, a bunch of amethyst and some red stuff.”
A veteran of the museum’s fossil digs, Robert loves rocks — so much so that mom Rhonda said he comes home from school with pocketsful.
Seven-year-old William King found pinkish stones — he thought they might be quartz — and amethyst in his stash. Also a regular at museum events, William said he liked rocks for no special reason beyond admiring “all the shades they come in.”
On Saturday’s 9 a.m. grouping, several children said they were regulars at the Rankin’s geology events — and they weren’t just from Ellerbe. Some came from Bisco, Cornelius, Hamlet, Monroe and Rockingham.
“It’s a lot of the same faces,” museum board president Brett Webb said as he looked over the children and their seines. “It’s really amazing” the way interest in rocks has caught on among younger museum-goers.
Soon, Webb said, the museum will draw them in with seining for seashells and arrowheads — not technically mining but still looking for treasure.
Saturday’s event provided would-be miners with bags of “rough” salted with gemstones ranging from emeralds to rubies to pyrite. The children poured a bit of dirt into their wood-framed seines, swooshed the seines in water from the flume, then picked the gems from among the remaining gravel.
As the 9 a.m. group finished, two little boys remained behind, sorting through the buckets full of others’ cast-off stones, hoping for good finds.
Reach Christine Carroll at 910-817-2673.