The Fricot Nugget and the State Mineral Museum
Near Mariposa, California
About a mile and a half south of downtown Mariposa on the grounds of the county fairgrounds, the California State Mining and Mineral Museum holds one of the more remarkable objects in California's care. It is called the Fricot Nugget, named for the family from whom the state acquired it. The nugget weighs two hundred one troy ounces, which works out to roughly fourteen pounds of gold, and it is made of crystalline gold, which means the atoms arranged themselves into natural geometric crystal shapes rather than the smoother rounded masses typical of placer gold.
It was found in eighteen sixty-four or eighteen sixty-five in El Dorado County, and sources differ on the exact date. Most gold nuggets of comparable size were melted down immediately, because liquid gold is easier to transport and value than an awkward lump of metal. The Fricot Nugget somehow survived intact.
It was exhibited at the Paris World's Fair in eighteen seventy-eight and eventually donated to the state in nineteen thirty. The museum that now protects it was established in eighteen eighty as the California State Mining Bureau's collection and moved to Mariposa in the nineteen eighties. The collection includes thirteen thousand objects, among them the state gemstone benitoite, a blue mineral that glows electric blue under ultraviolet light, a platinum nugget, and a scale model of a stamp mill, the machine that crushed gold-bearing quartz rock into powder.
The Fricot Nugget lives in its own vault. You can stand in front of it and look at fourteen pounds of crystalline gold and think about every person who decided not to melt it.
