1.2 Carat Diamond Found In Mud By Wisconsin Native
A diamond in the rough may be hard to find, but one Wisconsin man has found a diamond in the mud.
Dan Fagnan made a big find when he discovered a diamond in his friend's well. The St. Croix County native was shifting through the mud of his friend's recently dug 120-foot well and while panning through the wet mud for flakes of gold, he found something else that caught his eye: a 1.22-carat diamond.
"Everyone thinks I'm a fruit loop for panning for gold," Fagnan said in an interview with the New Richmond News.
Fagnan has found small gold flakes before but the panning has never amounted to much until now. As he shifted through the wet mud mixed with stone and sand, he caught sight of what he first thought was just glass. He then took the fragment to a jewelry shop nearby who said that Fagnan had found a 1.2-carat rough diamond.
Karen Greaton, owner of the jewelry store, wanted to make sure it was properly identified, since nothing like this has ever happened in the area.
Greaton told the New Richmond News, "My dad told me it's unlikely to find a diamond here, but diamonds can actually be found anywhere in the world."
Greaton send the fragment to a mineralogist who was able to confirm to the store owner that it was in fact a diamond. The diamond may have arrived in Wisconsin over thousands of years through volcanic activity in Canada that forced it to its last resting place sometime after the last ice age, the report suggested.
Fagnan already has plans for the stone: instead of selling it, he will put the diamond in a necklace made for his unborn child. The jewelers decided to keep the diamond raw and not cut it, because then Fagnan would end up losing about 60 percent of the stone.
