Franklin, NC — the 'Gem Capital of the World,' where ruby and sapphire mines in the Cowee Valley have drawn diggers since the 1870s, plus the only tartans museum in America.
You're coming into Franklin now, and it calls itself the Gem Capital of the World — and it's not just boasting. The hills north of town, up in the Cowee Valley, are studded with rubies, sapphires, and garnets, and folks have been mining them here since around eighteen seventy. Today it's you who gets to dig: there are gem mines all around Franklin where you buy a bucket of gravel and wash it through a flume looking for treasure.
Now, one honest tip from a ranger who's seen folks fooled. The mines sell two kinds of bucket. 'Enriched' or 'salted' buckets have been seeded with gems — often pretty ones from other countries — so you're guaranteed to 'find' something. The 'native' buckets are real, un-doctored local dirt, and you might find nothing, or you might find a genuine North Carolina ruby you dug out of the actual ground. If you want the real thrill, ask for native dirt.
Franklin's also got a couple of surprises for a little mountain town: the gem and mineral museum, housed in the old eighteen-fifties jail, and the only Scottish Tartans Museum in all of America — a nod to the Scots-Irish who settled these mountains and gave Appalachia so much of its music and its stubborn streak. Boone's got the deeper story of this ground, and it's older than any of it.
Photo: James St. John · CC BY 2.0
