PORT ST. LUCIE PEOPLE
Halleran displays a nearly perfect example of a double-terminated
quartz crystal that he mined back in the 1980s.
EDWARD THOMAS HALLERAN III
Age: 71
Lives In: Port St. Lucie
Family: Son, James, 50, from Long Island, N.Y.
Occupation: Retired, but never retired — always doing
something.
Education: Associate of arts degree in business
Hobbies: Mining the Herkimer mine, studying geology,
playing drums, horseshoes
Someone who inspires me: Jesus Christ
One thing most people don’t know about me: “That I
loved my father. Everyone knew I loved my mother but
there were questions about that and I really, truly loved
my father.”
has been slowly unboxing some of the pieces.
“I am working with a local artist and friend who is making
jewelry out of some of the Herkimer diamonds,” Halleran
says. “I’ve also got some pieces on display at LuLuRocks in
Jensen Beach, so I am slowly trying to introduce the collection
to the world.”
Besides working through his quartz collection, Halleran has
authored a booklet titled How To Breathe, plays the drums and
keeps active playing games like horseshoes and being outdoors.
Ultimately, Halleran is hoping to find a large enough space
to display Stardust once again and take a trip to Japan in 2023
to spread the healing properties his collection boasts.
Visit HerkimerRockstar.com to learn more about Halleran’s
collection. E
collection of Herkimer diamonds in hundreds of 5-gallon
buckets. He stored them away in a basement in the East Village
of New York City for another 18 years before he was able
to begin processing through the buckets in 2011.
Halleran recalls watching his favorite shows on the television
while screening the crystals in order to polish and clean
them. He used a dental pick to be extra detailed and careful.
“It’s like a puzzle to put them all back together,” Halleran
says. “I had to separate the diamonds from the dust and
mud, and I would find beautiful druzy pieces rocks with a
coating of fine, sugar like crystals.
Halleran used a number of different tools while working at the Herkimer
diamond mine in New York state’s Mohawk Valley.
The clusters that Halleran collected are rare because of the
way the crystal is formed: there is little to no contact with the
host rock. The entire cleaning and polishing stage took Halleran
about three years to complete, but when he did, the huge
collection was aptly named Stardust.
“I laid everything out on a 12-foot by 16-foot table and it
looked like stardust,” Halleran says. “I believe we are all stardust,
everything we see is stardust. The Mohawk people held
these crystals in high esteem and believed they had healing
properties. You can feel it, they amplify it.”
When Halleran sold his Mohawk Valley home in 2021 and
moved to Port St. Lucie, he brought the 19 bankers’ boxes
that were full of his Stardust collection. Since the move, he
26 Port St. Lucie Magazine
/HerkimerRockstar.com