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Hillman
Hall of Minerals & Gems,
celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, boasts thousands of
nature’s
most dazzling pieces of sculpture—
each with a story to tell.
By M.A. Jackson and Betsy Momich
Should Carnegie Museum of Natural History ever produce a film
about Hillman Hall of Minerals & Gems, the location shoots
would be all over the map, literally. A Carnegie Library
in Montana. A Kaufmann’s window display in downtown
Pittsburgh. A border crossing in Romania. A lead and zinc
mine in Joplin, Missouri.
Scene One: Downtown Pittsburgh,
outside Kaufmann’s department
store. It’s 1969, and Pittsburgh businessman Henry Hillman,
who graduated from Princeton University with a geology degree,
notices the reactions of passersby to one of the store’s
display windows—the one accentuated by a brilliant cluster
of minerals. “People were oohing and aahing more over
the minerals used as display props than the actual merchandise
being sold,” recounts Ron Wertz, president of the Hillman
Foundation.
“
That was one of the factors in our decision to fund the
hall,” Wertz explains. But only
under one condition: that the exhibits in the hall “present
minerals in the manner of sculpture, shown for their beauty
as well as their physical properties and economic uses.”
After
11 years of planning, construction, and more collecting,
Henry Hillman got his wish. For the past 25 years, visitors
have been oohing and aahing over the beauty that resides
in Hillman Hall of Minerals & Gems. The kind of beauty
unmatched by “anything humans can try,” says
Marc Wilson, collection manager and head of the Section
of Minerals for
the past 13 years, and a walking storybook of the who,
what, when, and where behind every piece in the collection.
Turns out, Hillman Hall of Minerals & Gems isn’t
just a collection of priceless objects. It’s a collection
of stories as varied as the shapes and colors of its stones,
gems, and crystals. Twenty-five years’ worth of stories.
The Quest for Beauty
A professional geologist with a master’s degree in
mineralogy, Wilson has traveled the globe—and, at
times, negotiated it by phone—to strategically build
the Museum of Natural History’s vast collection of
minerals and gems. Unofficially ranked in the top five
in the country for the depth and breadth of its holdings,
Hillman Hall ranks number-one in Wilson’s
eyes for its aesthetic beauty and dynamic display.
He’s
not alone in his thinking. “It’s
one of the most superb displays I’ve ever seen,” says
Donald A. Palmieri, a master gemologist appraiser and a
research associate with the museum’s Section of Minerals
since 1983. “In my opinion, it outshines the [Smithsonian’s]
National Museum of Natural History.”
To hear Wilson
talk about the collection, there’s
no other way to display such beauty than as art. Of the
crystals on display in the hall, he says, “they represent
a microcosm of the order of God’s creation. They
are so perfect, so ordered, so beautiful. And each one
is unique.” Of the process of finding such rare things
of beauty—either by trade, purchase, or an actual
trip into a mine—Wilson describes an amalgam of emotions
often associated with other quests for the beautiful: “lust,
greed, adventure, and vindication.”
No doubt it was
the thrill of adventure—coupled with
the most basic of human instincts, self-preservation—that
Wilson experienced during a trip to the eastern bloc to
secure a batch of minerals the likes of which the world
had never seen.
Covert Operations
Scene Two: The
border crossing of Romania. Marc Wilson is standing before
a group of gun-toting guards as his
latest acquisition—the world’s only known “triple
ball” specimen of calcite with boulangerite (now
displayed among Hillman Hall’s Systematic Collection)—lay
tucked in a camera bag.
In the mid-’90s, Wilson
had realized that Romania’s
most prolific mineral district—one dating back to
Roman times—would probably dry up within the next
six years; and no one in the United States had yet to put
together a comprehensive collection of specimens from the
region.
 “
A friend of mine had already successfully entered Romania
and had learned about the ins-and-outs of getting specimens
out of the country,” Wilson recounts. “So he
and I decided to quietly, secretly put together a suite
of the best specimens we could get from the district before
other big museums realized we were doing it.”
Easy
enough. Or not. As Wilson explains, “In any
Third World country, especially one that is still so authoritarian
and so recently communist, you have to know how to
‘
pay your fees.’” In other words, you have to
know who to bribe. “That’s just how it’s
done,” he says, matter-of-factly.
Unfortunately, when
Wilson joined his friend in Romania to bring his newly
acquired Romanian specimens home, he
discovered that all the necessary fees had not been paid
in advance. After lengthy deliberations at the border, his
friend negotiated an opportunity for the specimens
to be removed from the country on another day; and then,
according to Wilson, his friend made a “side negotiation” for
the valuable calcite piece to go home with Wilson that
day. “He then handed it to me in a camera bag as
I stood there in the middle of no-man’s land, somewhere
between Romania and Hungary, and left.”
If it all
sounds a bit like secret-agent work, that’s
because it is. “The acquisition of almost any world-class
piece is a covert operation,” Wilson says. “That’s
why we meet in little rooms in the dark and have discussions
in dingy cafes.”
Behind This Curtain
Wilson’s acquisition of what he considers one of
the best Russian mineral suites went a little smoother.
That is, after the Iron Curtain finally fell.
“
Some of the most significant mineral deposits on Earth
had been sealed behind the Iron Curtain,” Wilson
says. “Collectors risked Siberia, or worse.” But
with the fall of communism, they became free to collect,
buy, sell, and trade, and the rest of the world was more
than ready to oblige. “It was an incredibly exciting
time,” he says.
Wilson contacted a collector he had
heard was obtaining Russian pieces at a good price. The
man sold the best pieces
he could gather to Wilson, and Pittsburgh soon became the
repository of an outstanding suite of 168 minerals from
Russia—some even better than those displayed in Moscow,
Wilson professes.
Like 80 percent of what Hillman Hall has
displayed before and after Marc Wilson’s tenure,
the funding for these rare international purchases came
from the Hillman Foundation.
“
Marc determines what we need and the quality of the item
for sale,” says Wertz, who has become a close collaborator
of Wilson’s. In the case of the 2000 Fluorescence
and Phosphorescence exhibit that demonstrated how minerals
react to ultraviolet light, Wertz fully supported Wilson’s
dream of breaking new ground at the museum.
“
After he completed the exhibit, other museums called to
ask how he did it,” says Collections Assistant Debra
Wilson, Marc’s wife.
“
Marc does everything he can to make the hall shine,” Donald
Palmieri says. “I’m in awe every time I go
in there. Pittsburgh and the museum are very fortunate
to have the Hillman Foundation as a stalwart supporter.”
Nice Surprises
Scene Three: The Carnegie Library in Kalispell, Montana.
It’s the only source of
culture in this northwest-Montana town, and David and Stephanie
Walker frequent it often. During one of their visits, the
Walkers—who have built their own impressive collection
of cut gems—learn about Andrew Carnegie’s museum
of natural history in Pittsburgh and its renowned gem collection.
“
Three years ago, Mrs. Walker called me out of the blue
to tell us she and her husband would like to donate some
of their collection to the museum, starting with $11,000-worth
of cut gemstones,” Wilson says. “I was totally
taken by surprise.” Since then, the couple has donated
two other parcels of their collection valued at $26,000.
And they’re not done.
Personal collectors have been
integral to the museum’s
gem and mineral collection since the 1895 opening of Carnegie
Museums. (See also Acquired Taste.)
The 550-piece personal collection of Gustave Guttenberg,
a curator at
the Academy of Art and Science, was one of the first private
collections purchased by the museum. In 1904, Andrew Carnegie
purchased the 12,000-specimen collection of William W.
Jefferis, a West Chester, Pa., collector, who had amassed
one of the finest private collections in the country. It
put the museum on the map as a mineral repository, and
portions of the Jefferis collection are still displayed
today—including a $15,000 wulfenite and an Arizona
calcite still bearing its 1880s two-dollar price tag.
Still
another private collector, Frederick H. Pough, through
a donation/sale agreement, gave 800 rare and unusual gems
during the planning of Hillman Hall of Minerals & Gems.
And then there was the Oreck family’s $2 million
donation in 2003, which included a 379-carat cut aquamarine and two of the finest specimens of watermelon tourmalines known to exist. “We
were shocked by the magnitude of that donation,” says
Wilson. “The tourmalines put our collection on par
with The Smithsonian.”
Acts of God—and
Man
Scene Four: A
lead and zinc mine in Joplin, Missouri. In this mining
district, corporations and private collectors
had been hitting pay dirt for years (and would continue
to do so through the mid-1900s). On this particularly
productive day in 1895, someone has struck the next best
thing to gold: a yellowish-gold pseudomorph of hemimorphite
after calcite.
Two years later and a few thousand
miles away, Andrew Carnegie became the happy recipient
of that rare and precious piece
of calcite, which was donated to his museum by A.L. Means.
Now encased behind glass in Hillman Hall’s Masterpiece
Gallery, Wilson says “it’s still the signature
specimen of the collection. There are only six in existence.”
While
it was Andrew Carnegie’s international stature
that gave him an edge in attracting and connecting with
some of the world’s great collectors, it’s
Marc Wilson’s never-say-never networking skills that
have managed to do the same for Hillman Hall.
 RIght:
This year’s Gem & Mineral
Show celebrates the 25th anniversary of Hillman Hall of Minerals & Gems,
which has a collection that rivals most others in the country.
Wilson calls
finding a cranberry red tourmaline in 2004 “an
act of God,” but it was also a testament to the value
of his extensive network of “friends” and professional
contacts. “I mentioned to a friend how much I’d
love one for the collection and, as luck would have it,
he’d just found one in his collection a few days
earlier and didn’t know why he still had it.” He
sold it at cost to Wilson. In another similar act of God
or man, a Canadian friend of Wilson’s was downsizing
his collection and sold Wilson a much-desired $5,000 quartz
for $750.
The hall’s Quartz exhibit, created in 2002
with support from the Hillman Foundation, is its third
most popular
exhibit, according to Wilson. Exactly how he’s figured
that out is hardly a scientific process. “It’s
the ‘fingerprint index,’” he says, smiling. “We
count the fingerprints left on the display glass at the
end of a busy day to judge an exhibit’s popularity.
The temporary birthstone display wins every time, followed
closely by the gold and quartz exhibits.”
Wilson hopes
to expand the popular birthstone display and make it permanent
someday soon. “And I’d love
to add a piece like the Hope Diamond that’s on display
at The Smithsonian,” he says. “Something else
that would help make Pittsburgh a destination place.”
If
you’re the owner of just such a specimen, Marc
Wilson would love to hear from you.
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Copyright (c)
2005 CARNEGIE Magazine. All rights reserved.