One hundred facets for one hundred years: the Port Moody Centennial Stone brought together local history, rockhounding, lapidary skill and decades of friendship in a single remarkable gemstone.
In 2013, the City of Port Moody celebrated its 100th anniversary. To mark the occasion, long-time club member and master faceter Geoff Cameron created a special gemstone with a custom design of exactly 100 facets — one for every year of the City's existence.
The material chosen for the project was itself part of the Club's history: a flawless quartz crystal collected near Four Brothers Mountain, close to Hope, British Columbia, by long-time members Les and Marg Flanagan. The result was a stone whose story stretched back decades before Port Moody's centennial celebration.
The Hunt for the Quartz
Around half a century earlier, Les and Marg regularly explored creeks along Highway 1 in search of agates and other interesting material. On one trip near Hope, they noticed fragments of quartz in a creek and decided to follow the trail uphill.
Their search eventually led them to a deposit of high-quality quartz crystal on the mountainside. The crystals occurred in soft brown clay and ranged from small hand specimens to pieces weighing as much as 40 pounds. Some contained phantoms — earlier stages of crystal growth preserved inside later growth — while others were double terminated.
The locality became a favourite destination for family camping and collecting trips, and over the years the Flanagans assembled an impressive collection from the site. It was one of many rockhounding adventures shared by two people who became deeply involved in the local lapidary community.
Creating the Centennial Stone
Geoff Cameron selected one of the Flanagans' clear quartz crystals and transformed it into a large faceted gemstone. Rather than using an established pattern, the stone was given a custom 100-facet design created specifically for Port Moody's centennial.
- Material: Quartz
- Origin: Four Brothers Mountain area near Hope, British Columbia
- Size: 15.7 mm
- Weight: 13.01 ct
- Facets: 100
- Faceter: Geoff Cameron
The finished stone was unveiled at the Club's 2013 Rock and Gem Show, appropriately themed “From Then to Now — 35 Years of Having Fun with Rocks.”
A Gift to the City
On November 26, 2013, representatives of the Port Moody Rock and Gem Club formally presented the Centennial Stone to the City of Port Moody in recognition of its 100th birthday and as a gesture of thanks for the City's support of the Club since it moved to Port Moody in 1978.
The presentation brought the story full circle: quartz discovered on a family rockhounding trip decades earlier had been transformed by a fellow club member into a commemorative gemstone and returned to the community as a permanent piece of local history.
The Centennial Stone reflects much of what has always defined the local lapidary community — exploration, craftsmanship, friendship and the pleasure of turning a remarkable natural find into something with lasting meaning.