While representing a major dropoff in naming flair from the world-record-holding Welcome Stranger, this goliath isn’t far off in size and weight, clocking in at 3,351 ounces (or 95 kilograms). If you’re ever in Melbourne, Australia, you can view a replica of Welcome Stranger in the City Museum. ![]() As for Deason and Oates, they were paid £9,381 by the London Chartered Bank of Australia for their discovery. Of course, legend also holds that some of the excited miners broke pieces off before it even arrived at the smelters, so who knows just how much it would have been worth in its original incarnation. If still intact today, it’s estimated that the Welcome Stranger would be worth at least $3 million. Prospecting in the wilds of Moliagul, Victoria, Australia, Englishmen John Deason and Richard Oates came across the mammoth, record-setting nugget, which was soon broken up into three pieces - each of which was later melted down. Weighing in at a staggering 3,524 ounces, or just a shade under an even 100 kilograms, it would have been hard to miss the welcome - and would have surely required a wagon or two to haul - provided by this beast of a gold nugget back in 1869. With that in mind…get a load (and a lode) of these historic nuggets, and the unique and colorful stories behind each of them. While there’s no official breakdown or classification of sizes between dust, flakes, pickers and nuggets, a piece of gold is often considered a nugget when it exceeds one gram in weight. The most common size of gold is so fine that it’s called “gold dust” - and it might take thousands and thousands of gold dust pieces to compile a single ounce of gold. To get a sense of just how large and rare these nuggets are, consider that around 98% of the gold that’s been mined from Earth didn’t come in the form of a placer gold nugget, since the vast majority of gold is typically recovered by forcefully blasting it out. In fact, as “luck” might have it, each of these three beauties was unearthed in one particular exotic locale: Australia. And in fact, the largest intact gold nugget currently in existence, the Hand of Faith, is now on display at the Golden Nugget Casinoīut for the purposes of this blog, we’ll take a closer look at the three largest gold nuggets ever discovered – not just in America, but throughout our mineral-rich planet. When you hear the term “Gold Nugget” today, you might think of a classic Las Vegas casino. Its place is equally prominent when it comes to our treasured jewelry pieces. Its discovery drove, inspired and expanded America, paving a brilliant path to modern society, ingenuity and industry. The Marshall Nugget remains in the collections as evidence of the discovery of gold in California.Gold. ![]() In 1861, the National Institute and its geological specimens, including this gold and the letter, entered the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. Within weeks, President Polk formally declared to Congress that gold had been discovered in California. Polk and for preservation at the National Institute. Sutter."īy August of 1848, as evidence of the find, this piece and other samples of California gold had arrived in Washington, D.C., for delivery to President James K. A letter of transmittal from Folsom that accompanied the packet lists Specimen #1 as "the first piece of gold ever discovered in this Northern part of Upper California found by J. Lucien Loeser by ship to Panama, across the isthmus by horseback, by ship to New Orleans, and overland to Washington. Folsom had journeyed to Northern California to verify the gold claim for the U.S. ![]() Army Assistant Quartermaster at Monterey. In June of 1848, Colonel Sutter presented Marshall's first-find scale of gold to Capt. According to Sutter's diary, Marshall stooped down to pick it up and "found that it was a thin scale of what appeared to be pure gold." Marshall bit the metal as a test for gold. John Sutter on the morning of January 24, 1848, on the South Fork of the American River at Coloma, California, when he saw something glittering in the water of the mill's tailrace. James Marshall was superintending the construction of a sawmill for Col. This small piece of yellow metal is believed to be the first piece of gold discovered in 1848 at Sutter's Mill in California, launching the gold rush.
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