When we first started holding the Mineral and Gem Festival in Spruce Pine, there werent any motels or places to eat, Charlie Mae Sproles (Mrs. G.B) Sproles remembers. The first two or three years, we had to ask people in the community to make their spare bedrooms available to put up dealers and visitors.

To solve the dining problem, we got the ladies from the lunchroom to cook two meals a day and serve the food in the school cafeteria, she says. We had to borrow tables from churches in the community to set up the mineral displays. Everybody pitched in and helped. We had good cooperation.

From the beginning, the festival, held for decades in Harris Middle School before it moved to its current location in the Pinebridge Center, attracted thousands of visitors. Mrs. Sproles became the festivals second director in its third year (1961) and continued in that capacity for a quarter century. A retired school teacher with a lifelong interest in mineral collecting, she has missed only a few festivals since then.

She dates the beginning of her own love for minerals to the day an old gentleman left a bag of mineral specimens in her parents country store. I thought those specimens, especially the clear quartz, were beautiful, and I asked my mother whether I could have them if the man never came back for them. She said I could, and eventually gave them to me. Later I started going to the mines to Carters Ridge for aquamarine and to the Crabtree Emerald Mine, to collect.

When she began teaching, she introduced her students to the world of minerals and gems by taking them out into the school driveway. I thought it was important for them to know the local minerals. They could gather seven or eight of them right in the driveway. Then I took them to the feldspar flotation plant. My class won the regional science fairs in places like Boone with their mineral collections, she says.

When one talks of the Mineral and Gem Festival, conversation always turns to Charlie Mae. She defined the Mineral and Gem Festival for a quarter of a century and its success is due in large part to her dedication and commitment to this Show.

Mrs. Sproles has kept a scrapbook of the Mineral and Gem Festival from its beginning. As you turn the pages of this well worn book, you can see the love and dedication that Mrs. Sproles put into the Show for 25 years. This dedication was the seed that grew the Show into the Festival that it is today.

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This page updated Tuesday, May 18, 2004 by Pegasus Creations.