Conventional American silver manufacture made spoons with gemstones are rare. Most of the examples are either hobbiest made which would put them in the arts and crafts category or indian made which would put them in that category.
But, as luck would have it, I do have a few pieces to share with you.
This white stone appears to be a miners cut diamond. The bowl is engraved "Nannie". I suspect that the diamond was removed from another piece of jewelry and mounted in this spoon as a present.
S. Kirk and Son is the manufacturer of this beautifully engraved handle with a nice oval shaped piece of emerald-green jadeite mounted on it.
These two pieces feature round pieces of turquoise mounted on conventional looking spoons
Natural placer gold nuggets from Alaska are mounted on these spoons
More gold nugget spoons may be seen in the Yukon exhibit
A set of 12 spoons featuring the gemstone for each month was made. The stones in this set are very tiny. Be careful when buying these spoons as the stones sometimes fall off. The bowls are embossed with a verse about the month. The pearl is the birthstone for June.
Another style of birthstone spoon (June) which is advertising the stone "alexandrite". This stone, however, is a similar looking stone, not a true alexandrite which is rather expensive.
Left: This hand made spoon features a nicely faceted red stone which I suspect is a garnet. The bowl is engraved "Trenton Mo". Right. Basically the same spoon, but there is a pretty green stone mounted in the finial and the ribbon is engraved "May". I suspect that the stone is a peridot, although Emerald is the birthstone.
This cute sterling spoon from Isle Royale, Houghton, Michigan (a wilderness national park island in Lake Superior) features a very unusual round cabachon greenish /black stone with an intricate green matrix. This stone has now been identified as pumpelleyite, a rare variety of greenstone which is only found in Michigan and it is also the official state gemstone. The multi-color "blotch" on the top is from the scanner.
A hand made heart finial and bowl "love spoon" sporting a deep blue stone which I think is a sapphire.
Soldered to the top of this conventionally produced spoon is a natural placer gold nugget. The bowl is engraved "Denver" and the back is engraved "M.B.". Colorado produced a lot of gold and silver, but most of the gold nugget spoons are from Alaska. You can see the Alaska nugget spoons under the Yukon exhibit from the gemstone index. The style of engraving in the bowl of this spoon is also different and somewhat unusual. The engraver used a 3-D style font and produced half of each letter in a conventional manner and half using a roulette tool.
In my first book, I showed a picture of a spoon with petrified wood and engraved "California" on the handle. I had borrowed this spoon for the picture. Now I have acquired my own version of this spoon.
This spoon is engraved "petrified forest" in the bowl, but there is no mention of the location on the handle. There are several of these forests in the western United States. The biggest and best known one is in Arizona, and there is a smaller one in Utah. There is also a small one in California. This spoon is marked with the Tammen Co. mark (Denver, Colorado), as was the other spoon. I suspect that the wood in both cases came from the Arizona forest.
Uranium
City, Saskatchewan (Lake Athabasca)
A very unusual spoon featuring a natural piece of raw cobalt at the finial. The Sudbury District of Ontario, Canada is one of the few commercial sources of this rare element which is used to make permanent magnets for electronic applications. It can also be made into a nuclear bomb and has various other uses in industry.
A very nice large cabachon cut amethyst stone mounted on a spoon made by BM Co. of Canada. Until about the turn of the century, amethyst was a valuable gemstone and because of its "passionate" color it was very popular in "love" jewelry. Shortly before 1900 huge deposits of it were found in Brazil and Uruguay and today it is quite inexpensive.
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