An March 1865 Witnessed Fall: Vernon County, Wisconsin, USAForeshadowed the Death of a President |
Posing with an faux antique scale cube, Vernon County rests patiently as it has in collections for almost 150 years. It is written that its fall attracted little attention, but today meteorite collectors worldwide covet such historic witnessed falls of small TKWs. |
For the fledgling United States, the year 1865 is the dividing line between the Civil War and Reconstruction, and during that year only a single meteorite was witnessed to fall within the young borders of the US. The meteorite fell just 20 days before the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Coincidence or fate?
Does a foreshadowing seem a stretch? Well, some Chinese think that Communist Party Chairman Deng Xiao Peng’s death on February 19th was foreshadowed by the February 15 fall of the Juancheng meteorites. Then why not Vernon County and Abraham Lincoln?
Vernon County is classified as a veined H6 chondrite. About 1500 grams of Vernon County was recovered in the form of two stones; one weighing 800g and the other 700g. Sadly the 800g stone was lost within a few years of its fall. The distribution of Vernon County according to the Catalogue of Meteorites is as follows: 123g in the Harvard Collection 65g in the Paris Museum of Natural History 37g in Natural History Museum in London 28g in the Vienna Museum 22g in the Field Museum in Chicago 18g in University Geological Museum in Copenhagen 8g in the MtN in Berlin 7g in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History 2g in the collection of the Max Planck Institute 2g in the American Museum of Natural History in New York 1.5g in the Collection of the University of New Mexico My specimen fits nicely between Berlin and Copenhagen. |
The following excerpt is from the 1884 book Original Researches in Mineralogy and Chemistry by John Lawrence Smith and Joseph Benson Marvin. |
This feast for the eyes has an extra helping of crust along its two original edges. Smith and Marvin described Vernon County as being covered with “a thick, black, dull crust.” They get no argument from me. |
Another small patch of crust spilled over onto this face contrasting colorfully with the iron oxide that H6 specimens are famous for. |
The lone cut face on my specimen show classic H6 texture. Much metal is visible, and although expressed as a rusty orange on broken faces, shows a shiny steely white when sliced. |
While the connection to President Lincoln is a stretch, it does place the fall of Vernon County into a familiar time frame in American history. Lucky for the Vernon County meteorite that just 17 years earlier Wisconsin became a state. Otherwise this orphaned treasure might have joined its long lost sibling.
Until next time…
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