Sierra Buttes Monumental Claim Gold Nugget
In 1869, a group of miners were on their way to work when they saw a small portion of this 109 pound gold nugget sticking out of the ground. The recent rains had washed away enough of the dirt that was covering it so it could be seen by the workers. As you can imagine, they quickly began digging it out of the ground. No one was expecting how big it was.
You can see a replica of the actual gold nugget in the Kentucky Mine Museum near Sierra City.
See Where The Largest Ever Gold Nugget Was Found
Its like winning Lotto. But more exciting. Imagine stubbing your toe on a 72.04kg lump of gold!
Its like winning Lotto. But more exciting. Imagine stubbing your toe on a 72.04kg lump of gold! Little wonder that John Deason and Richard Oates, the miners who discovered this 61cm x 31cm haul on February 5, 1869, called it the Welcome Stranger, at Moliagul in central Victoria. It was the largest single deposit of alluvial gold ever found in the world.
Deason and his mates hacked away at their find, chipping off bits of attached quartz so it could be weighed and valued at nearby Dunolly. Seems they were pretty rough and ready and it smelted down to just 70.5kg. The remaining odd bits and chips went to the helpers but Deason and Oates could afford to be generous. At todays rates the remaining 2268 ounces paid around $2.3m.
All that remains today is a memorial in the tiny ghost town of Moliagul and a replica in the City Museum in Treasury Place, Melbourne. Over a century later in 1980, in nearby Wedderburn, an oddly shaped 27.2kg nugget was discovered using a metal detector. Named the Hand of Faith, it was sold for US$1m and remains the worlds largest intact nugget, now on display in the Gold Nugget Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.
Where // Moliagul and Wedderburn are within 40km of each other in the Golden Triangle, an area thats produced the most gold nuggets in Australia. Its not far from Bendigo in Victorias appropriately named Goldfields region.
What Is The Largest Gold Nugget Around Today
The Pepita Canaa is the largest gold nugget that exists today. This gold nugget has about 1,682 troy ounces of gold within it. Yet, a little over 10% of the nugget is stone, so the worlds largest gold nugget actually looks like a large mound of brownish-gray stone.
The Pepita Canaa weighs about 134lbs, and it is on display in Museu de Valores do Banco Central in Brazil, the country in which it was discovered. That makes this nugget unusual because most of the largest gold nuggets are simply smelted, refined, and then sold immediately.
Although the Pepita Canaa is still a large nugget, its not close to the largest gold nugget ever found. The Welcome Stranger was a much larger gold nugget, and it was a nugget. While Holtermanns Nugget might bear the name, it was technically not a nugget. Thus, we cant keep it in first place on our list.
Nevertheless, its interesting to know just how many of the largest nuggets and gold specimens that exist come from one part of the world. Although the U.S. is famous for its gold rushes, Australia and Brazil were also home to some of the largest nuggets ever found!
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Largest Gold Nuggets Found
Narrator : Australia is home to the first and second-largest gold nuggets recorded in history. The first one was named Welcome Stranger and was found in the state of Victoria in 1869. It weighed 158 pounds. This record was beat on September 11th, 2018 when miner Henry Dole discovered a nugget that weighed 198 pounds. This nugget was found in the beta hunt mine in the town of Kambalda. The miners discovered a sea of gold embedded in quartz, which took hours to pick up. Three miners were needed to lift this nugget, which as of January 30th, 2020, would be worth about $3.6 million. The total value of gold recovered that day amounted to 562 pounds of gold, valued at $14.2 million as of January 30th, 2020. The owners of the mine plan to auction the nugget because of its physical beauty and size. This discovery created excitement in Kambalda’s small community. In the years prior to the discovery, four mines were closed in Kambalda, making the find even more unexpected and special. Nine months after breaking the record, more rare specimens were found in the beta hunt mine. Many believe the next nugget to beat the record may be hidden under the surface at the very same mine. Call the number on your screen, or click the link below, if you’d like to learn more about the value of precious metals, and make sure to subscribe to see more of our videos on various topics.
Holtermann ‘nugget’: 10229 Ounces
While the Welcome Stranger is the largest gold nugget ever found, the biggest single gold specimen discovered on the planet is the Holtermann ‘Nugget’. Unearthed in October 1872 by German-born miner Bernhardt Holtermann at Hill End in New South Wales, Australia, the gold-embedded-in-quartz specimen weighed a staggering 10,229 ounces. The rock was valued at £12,000, which is $1.7 million in today’s money, before it was crushed and the gold extracted.
Fancy trying your hand at gold panning? See where you can still prospect for gold
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Where To See The Worlds Largest Gold Nuggets
In 1848, the discovery of a gold nugget in northern California sparked the California Gold Rush, the largest mass migration in U.S. history. Today, the idea of finding gold holds the same allure. An LA Times article describes modern-day prospectors in the Mother Lode region of California searching for gold the old-fashioned way, using buckets and classifiers, hog pans and cradles. CNN reports that members of the Association of Gold Seekers of Biella, Italy, are searching the banks of the Elvo river for gold that has washed down from the melting glaciers of the Alps.
Many discoveries of large gold nuggets have been recorded, but few remain. Most were melted down into gold bars or gold coins. Bullionstar.com profiles the top five largest named gold nuggets which are still in one piece and on display to the public:
Pepita Cana Gold Nugget
The Pepita Canaã is the third largest gold nugget ever to be found in the world, however, it does currently take the top spot of being the largest gold nugget known to be in existence today. And this monster nugget weighs in at 134 pounds.
This massive gold nugget was found in 1983 by miner Júlio de Deus Filho in the Serra Pelada gold mining region of Brazilian state of Pará and is currently on display in the Gold Room of the central banks money museum in Brazils federal capital Brasilia.
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Discover The Largest Gold Nugget Ever Found
Gold is one of the most famous precious metals around today. Gold has been used as a form of currency, turned into wedding rings, and used to make extravagant versions of things like plating for toilets. We love the color of gold and ascribe it to as many animals as possible. Obtaining gold is not always simple, though. Humans dig this precious metal out of the ground in small and large-scale operations. Today, we will show you the largest gold nugget ever found, show you where it was discovered, and what happened to it.
Ironstones Crown Jewel California
Ironstones Crown Jewel gold nugget is a single piece of crystalline leaf gold found in California in December 1992 by Sonora Mining Company. The gold was found embedded in quartz rock, however through a cleaning process involving hydrofluoric acid, most of the quartz was removed to reveal a single mass of gold weighing 44 troy pounds .
Ironstone Crown Jewel, Crystalline Leaf Gold
The Ironstone nugget is now on display at a heritage museum in Ironstone Vineyards in California, and is sometimes referred to as the Kautz Crystalline Gold Leaf Specimen in reference to John Kautz, owner of Ironstone Vineyards.
Gold and California have been interlinked since the famous northern California gold rush of the late 1840s early 1850s. The US is still a major gold producer, and in 2016 produced an estimated 209 tonnes of gold according to US Geological Surveys , putting it in fourth place behind, Chine, Australia and Russia. Nowadays however, Nevada and Alaska are the US two primary gold producing states, although there are still gold mining operations in California such as New Golds Mesquite gold mine.
Footnotes:
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Largest Gold Nugget Found In Alaska Rushes To $750000 To Lead Heritage Nature & Science Auction
| Massive specimen is one of the largest ever found in the Western Hemisphere |
MineralsHeritage Auctions is the largest fine art and collectibles auction house founded in the United States, and the world’s largest collectibles auctioneer. Heritage maintains offices in New York, Dallas, Beverly Hills, San Francisco, Chicago, Palm Beach, London, Paris, Geneva, Amsterdam and Hong Kong.Heritage also enjoys the highest online traffic and dollar volume of any auction house on earth . The Internet’s most popular auction-house website, HA.com, has more than 1,400,000 registered bidder-members and searchable free archives of five million past auction records with prices realized, descriptions and enlargeable photos. Reproduction rights routinely granted to media for photo credit.For breaking stories, follow us:and. Link toor
Largest Gold Nugget Found In Oregon
But what if you pulled out a gold nugget that weighed 17 pounds? Something that size would be worth almost half a million dollars! I can think of a lot of things I would do with that kind of cash. But drinking myself into poverty is definitely not one of them.
Well, thats exactly what happened to Mattie Collins, the gold prospector who discovered the largest gold nugget found in Oregon. In 1859 Collins found this massive chunk of gold in North Fork of Althouse Creek near the Rogue River in southern Oregon.
In todays money and at todays gold prices, a gold nugget that size would be worth just under $500,000. So what exactly did Mattie Collins do with the largest, most valuable gold nugget ever found in the state of Oregon? Surely he used it as a springboard to finance bigger and greater business opportunities. And surely he used the money to buid multi-generational wealth that can still be seen today.
Unfortunately, no. This isnt the case at all. As a matter of fact, according to Oregon gold mining historian Kerby Jackson, what Mattie Collins ended up doing was cashing in his gold nugget for $3500 which he then used to drink himself back into poverty.
Of course, the story doesnt end here. As you can imagine, once word got out about the find, that area of the river was prospected very hard. Then again, in the 1980s, it made headlines again as one prospector pulled out 130 ounces of gold in just two weeks.
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The Largest Gold Nugget Ever Found In Oregon: A Story Of Riches To Poverty
Oregon is known for producing some seriously large gold nuggets. Some weighing in at well over 10 pounds each! Could you imagine pulling something that large out of a river? Something that size would be worth around $270,000! What would you do with it? Would you cash it in? Im guessing most likely thats what most of us reading this post would do.
The Great Triangle Russia
The worlds second largest surviving gold nugget is the Great Triangle. This gold nugget was found in the Miass area of the Russian Urals mountains in 1842 by Nikofor Syutkin. It has a gross weight of 36.2 kgs and a gold assay of 91%, meaning that it has a fine gold content of 32.94 kgs, or 1059 troy ounces of gold. The Great Triangle” has dimensions of 31 cms * 27.5 cms * 8 cms, and as the name suggests, it is triangular in shape. When found, it was dug up from a depth of about 3.5 metres.
The Great Triangle gold nugget on display at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia
The Great Triangle gold nugget is owned by the Russian State, and through the Gokhran Fund , it is currently on display in the Diamond Fund collection in the Kremlin in Moscow. The Diamond Fund is an extensive permanent exhibition of the Russian states crown jewels, precious stones and gold and platinum nuggets.
While the Urals was one of Russias first gold mining areas, today, there are extensive gold mining operations in many areas of the Russian Federation, particularly in the East of the country. Russia is currently the worlds 3rd largest gold producer, with mining production output of 250 tonnes of gold in 2016.
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Sign Up For The Precious Metals Digest
Gold nuggets can be found in alluvial deposits or in other placer deposits , but gold nuggets can also be found in or close to primary gold deposits, for example gold lodes or veins which have been exposed by the weather. Gold nuggets can also technically be extracted from hard rock gold deposits as long as the surrounding rock can be removed.
There are a number of gold nuggets which claim to be the worlds largest. Obviously, not all of these claims can be true. There are also a number of largest gold nuggets lists which confusingly mix historical nuggets which no longer exist alongside nuggets which still exist.
We think a list of gold nuggets which still exist is more accurate, since many historical nuggets are now just legends and have long since been melted down into gold bars or gold coins. Therefore, the following list, based on research to the best of our abilities, profiles the largest named gold nuggets which are still in one piece, all of which are famous, all of which are on display, and all of which can be visited by the public.
The Biggest Gold Nugget Ever Found
Last year, an Australian family found a gold nugget just laying on the ground. Needless to say, this doesnt happen every day. In fact, finding a gold nugget is quite unusual even a small one. But every once in a while, somebody discovers a massive nugget. The biggest nugget ever discovered was over 600 pounds!
Virgin gold is a natural product of the geological process. A gold nugget is a mineral which chemical composition is a solid solution of silver with gold. Percent of silver in such a solution can be up to 43%. Also, the solution may include up to 0.9% of some other impurities . Depending on the composition, gold nuggets may have different colors and prices.
These are native minerals of the precious metal that comprise the largest part of the gold in nature. Gold nuggets are usually concentrated in hydrothermal deposits where gold ores are formed.
In nature, as a rule, gold is not concentrated at some point it nonuniformly distributes in crystalline silica and sulfides.
Even nowadays, for efficient gold prospecting, youll need a specialized metal detector aimed at detecting small-sized targets. But even in this case, your treasure hunting trip may not be successful.
Thats why people have always tended to look for large gold nuggets, even though they are quite seldom encountered.
He decided to try his hand at gold prospecting, and for several years he unsuccessfully continued gold mining.
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The Largest Gold Nugget Ever Found Welcome Stranger
The largest gold nugget to be pulled out of the soil is known as the Welcome Stanger Nugget. It was discovered by John Deason and Richard Oates back in 1869 in Victoria Australia.
These lucky fellows found the largest gold nugget ever and it weighed in at a refined weight of 2.283 oz. It was also 61 cm by 31 cm. Massive chunk of gold! Take a look at a replica of this stunning piece of gold below.
This is way more than a retirement nugget or the one ounce club!
Can you believe that the two miners were paid only 9,381 pounds sterling for the find. I cant imagine how much it would be worth today!
Such an important find like this deserves to be commemorated and a statue has been erected at the location where the biggest Gold Nugget ever found was located. You could go and see it for yourself in Victoria.
Other large gold nuggets have been found including the Welcome Nugget also found in Australia. Although all these big gold nuggets were all found way back in the past this does not mean that no more exist!
No man can cover all the earth in search of gold. My bet is that even larger ones lie undisturbed across the globe waiting for you to stumble across. All you may need is a Gold Detector, some hard work and a bit of luck.
The Largest gold piece ever found with a metal detector is known as the Hand of Faith and is pictured below. Found by Kevin Hillier yet again in Australia in 1980. This baby weighed in at 27.21 kgs!
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