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Historic Cox Collection 2-Piece Ore Suite: Silver & Tungsten – Ozark Shaft, MO (294g Total)
Locality: Ozark Shaft, Silver Mines District, Madison County, Missouri, USA
Provenance: Ex. Cox Family Collection
Minerals: Argentiferous Galena (Silver Ore), Wolframite (Tungsten Ore), Massive Topaz, Quartz, Chalcopyrite, Limonite
Total Weight: 294 grams (10.3 oz combined)
Specimen 1 (Wolframite): 2.25\" x 2.0\" x 1.125\" (171 grams)
Specimen 2 (Galena): 2.25\" x 1.75\" x 1.25\" (123 grams)
Condition: Natural rough historic ores with distinctly exposed crystal habits and tarnish.
About This Ore Suite:
Up for grabs is an exceptional, museum-grade matching set of historic Missouri pioneer ores, sourced directly from the highly regarded Cox Family Collection. This two-piece suite represents the primary economic drivers of the legendary Ozark Shaft: Silver and Tungsten.
Specimen 1 (The Tungsten Ore): A dense 171-gram block featuring dark metallic Wolframite. Unlike formless chunks, this piece clearly exhibits the rare, tabular, bladed crystal structure and parallel striations high-grade wolframite is known for. A dusting of brassy Chalcopyrite sits precisely at the contact points between the ore and the matrix.
Specimen 2 (The Silver Ore): A heavy 123-gram chunk of Argentiferous (silver-bearing) Galena. It exhibits textbook, stepped cubic cleavage overlaid with a gorgeous natural \"peacock\" tarnish—a striking blue and purple iridescence playing across the metallic faces.
Both of these historic ores are locked tightly into classic high-temperature greisen matrices composed of heavily fractured, ultra-glassy massive Topaz intimately intergrown with quartz. Deep, rusty limonite (iron oxide) staining permeates the fractures of both pieces, tying them together perfectly and giving them an authentic 19th-century hard-rock mining aesthetic.
The Geological History (The Ozark Shaft & Greisen Deposits):
The Silver Mines District in the St. Francois Mountains represents a unique geological anomaly in the Midwest—it is the state\'s only historic commercial silver and tungsten deposit. Over 1.4 billion years ago, superheated, volatile-rich magmatic fluids pushed through the local Precambrian granite. These intense fluids chemically altered the host rock into a \"greisen\" deposit, crystallizing massive topaz and depositing heavy, rare metallic ores into the veins. The Ozark Shaft was sunk in the late 1800s to chase these exact hydrothermal veins. Today, the mines are long abandoned, flooded, and strictly off-limits, making verified material from old hoards incredibly difficult to source.
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