Ben E Clement Mineral Museum

 August 2013
  During our visit to the American Fluorite Museum in Illinois the ladies told us about the Ben E Clement Mineral Museum in Marion, KY. We really enjoyed our time at the American Fluorite Museum and figured a visit to Marion would be on our list of places to visit some time in the future as there just was not enough time for a visit at this time.
  Turns out the future came a little bit sooner than we thought. After visiting family in Wisconsin we decided we would take a route that would take us close to the museum. We arrived having only two hours for our visit, thinking this would be enough time, boy were we in for a surprise.  Hour two hours slowly morphed into four hours and we could have stayed longer but we had to get on down the road to our next camp site in Cumberland Gap National Park.
  Mr. Ben E. Clement was a mineral prospector and collector of wonderful specimens.  I forget the date he arrived in the area but he operated a fluorite mine in Marion, KY and over the years he amassed a personal collection of fluorite and many other minerals that can only be rivaled by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, in fact I think a number of his pieces are in that museum as well.  He had a standing offer to all miners that if they found a special/unique piece to bring it to him and he would pay them for their find. I guess he was a man of his word because the specimens in this museum are wonderful.
  Upon our arrival the staff out numbered the visitors. My wife and I had the entire place to our self's and the curator was on hand to give us a personal guided tour, all this for $5 a person. Once the curator discovered that my wife was a geologist she took us to a back room where another collector had donated his entire collection to the museum. The curator wanted my wife to identify a few specimens she did not know. There were boxes stacked upon boxes in this out of the way room and we could have spent weeks there going though it all.
  The museum also sponsors fluorite digs  a couple times a year at couple near by fluorite mines. So if you are so incline look up their website for those dates, just type in Ben E Clement Mineral Museum and the search will take you to the site.
  There are so many great specimens in this museum that I can not put pictures of all of them here. I think I took over 300 of them. Oh yea, while we were there a local reporter interviewed my wife about the museum, and the curator send us a copy of the museum.