Cashing the first stone: hard rock, once the bane of Jamie Hill's existence, turns out to be a real gem for the Hiddenite emerald hunter.

• Author: Frank, Maggie
• Position: FEATURE

Even with summer slipping away, greenery envelops Hiddenite, sheathing the hills sliding down from the Brushy Mountains and the pastures flanking the two-lane highway leading into the Alexander County hamlet, about 15 miles northwest of Statesville. If you hang a right, green soon gives way to gray and brown, the colors of stone and soil, the latter also the color of a trailer that squats at the end of the dirt road. Here they hunt a different kind of green. The trailer houses headquarters of the mine that produced the most expensive emerald found in North America and thousands more carats of the gemstone.

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Next to the trailer, a machine that resembles a tractor sits idle for the moment. The custom-made rock crusher had been running seven days a week since June, when Jamie Hill went into the gravel business. "I'm not chasing gravel--I didn't found this company to be a granite quarry," says the 42-year-old chairman of North American Emerald Mines Inc. "But it's everywhere, and I've got to go through it, and I've got to pay to move it. And everybody wants it." Hill wants the world to know him as "The Emerald Man" and does not relish a reputation as a rock star. But crushed stone from his open-pit mine could be the cash cow that carries on his quest indefinitely. If he can keep selling even half the amount he sold in September, it might bring him in four years what he grossed from all the emeralds he has found in the last eight years--about $2 million.

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He has hired a subcontractor to crush the stone--actually migmatite, a metamorphic rock that resembles granite--to sell to paving and construction companies, which haul it away. In September, he was charging $10 a ton; Birmingham, Ala.-based Vulcan Materials, one the nation's largest producers, was charging $14.20 a ton for crusher-run rock in Charlotte. He says he grossed about $40,000 in August and double that in September. That should increase each month, he says, as the crushing process becomes more efficient and he raises prices a dollar or two per ton. He turned away $53,000 of business in September, he says, because he couldn't keep up with demand.

Since 2000, Hill has told many a media outlet he was on the brink of finding "the big pile," a cache of gemstones that would make it all worthwhile. He spent nearly a decade combing fields, making deals with farmers to dig up sections of their land and chip at rocks with a rusty screwdriver, before...