The Kentucky diamond
A discovery etched in history
NEAR THE ADAIR-RUSSELL COUNTY LINE many years ago, a gem of a mystery was discovered that has never been solved.
A brilliant natural diamond was found in a cow path on a farm near the rural Adair County community of Montpelier in the summer of 1888. The historical marker beside State Route 55, near the county line, says the diamond was discovered 2 miles north of the marker by a man who was taking a shortcut across the farm of Henry Burris, while walking to a nearby country store.
Oliver Helm, a local farmer, is said to have noticed the pebble gleaming in the sunlight, put it in his pocket and showed it to others at Wheat & Williams store in Montpelier. To determine whether the stone was a diamond, Cyrus Wheat, one the store owners, used it to etch his name on the store’s front window.
A Louisville hardware salesman who was at the store agreed to take the stone back to Louisville to see if it was really a diamond and what it might be worth. Helm needed enough to buy a cane mill.
The story goes that Louisville jeweler G.A. Schultz appraised the pebble as a gem quality diamond, 0.776 carat in weight, and that Helm sold it for $20, with which he bought his cane mill. It’s uncertain what Schultz did with the diamond, but the late Richard Blair, a Russell County historian, said it appeared five years later in an exhibit at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.
Eventually acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., it has remained for many years in the same collection as the museum’s world famous “Hope Diamond” and other notable gemstones.
A Smithsonian curator described it as roughly 8 millimeters in length, about as big as a pencil eraser at one point, 0.776 carat in weight, “kind of football-shaped, and sort of yellowish in color, almost a Chablis.”
Lloyd and Deann Holt of Russell Springs said they saw the diamond at the Smithsonian several years ago. And Mike Watson, staff historian and genealogist at the Adair County Public Library’s research center, was also shown what is often called ‘The Montpelier Diamond” during a visit.
Its discovery so near the Adair-Russell County line has led to good-natured claims on the diamond by both counties, although the exact location at which it was found in the cow path is not known, nor is its mysterious origin.
But the store window, into which Cyrus Wheat used the diamond to etch his name in 1888, remains in Adair County—in the living room of Gene and Sue Ann Collins, who live near Montpelier and are consumer-members of Taylor County RECC. Gene’s parents operated the former Wheat & Williams store and combined post office for many years, and when the old store building was torn down a few years ago, Sue Ann bought the window—itself now a collectible diamond in the rough.
