David Hasenfus stands inside his store Rock Shop, at 731 Bath Road in Wiscasset, the afternoon of Tuesday, July 22. Hasenfus, who is 87, has been fascinated by gems and minerals since the age of 7. He said the drive to collect has guided him over the years as he grew his collection and opened his storefront in 1976. (Molly Rains photo)
David Hasenfus, who owns hundreds if not thousands of gem and mineral specimens, can’t choose a favorite among them.
For 80 years, he has chipped through mines and quarries, driven cross-country to mineral shows, and sifted through private collections, always seeking the next glittering stone to take home. But when asked in the bright, gem-crowded interior of his Wiscasset store Rock Shop what it is exactly he looks for, Hasenfus didn’t have an answer.
“When you like minerals, you just keep going,” he said on Tuesday, July 22. “It became a hobby, and when you start at 7, it’s a disease, because you can’t quit.”
Hasenfus, who is now 87, has had minerals on the brain since his early childhood. He credited his father, a teacher, with getting him started with trips to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University in his youth.
Hasenfus, his parents, and his six siblings also traveled from their native Massachusetts to Maine in the summertime throughout his childhood. During those trips, Hasenfus traveled to quarries and mines across the state with older family members and friends. There, he began digging for specimens himself and truly became passionate about gems and minerals.
“I just got hooked on the quarries up here,” said Hasenfus. “When people were mining, it was like a family.”
Maine is known for its tourmaline, quartz, and mica, Hasenfus said. These and other local gemstones are in his current collection, as well as other stones sourced from far and wide. The spectrum of minerals that gleam in the glass cases in his store hail from around the world, from South America to Africa, he said.
On one shelf, ammonite fossils from Madagascar shine with many-colored minerals, ornaments that formed inside the shell over the millions of years since the soft-bodied creature that once inhabited it died and was interred in clay on the sea floor. Nearby are a set of dinosaur footprints collected by one of Hasenfus’s reliable sources, a passionate collector and fossil hunter from Massachusetts. On the next shelf, fossilized horse bones are kept handy in an open cardboard box beside an array of rainbow-gleaming bismuth crystals.
Hasenfus knows these specimens – and the hundreds more in his shop – well, just as he knows the unique geologic histories behind their existence. Some of the samples have unique properties that only a prepared observer would unlock, like fluorescence.
On July 22, turning the beam of an ultraviolet flashlight from one sample to another, Hasenfus set the stones glowing in unexpected surges of pink, white, and green. Certain minerals, he explained, fluoresce under ultraviolet light, which the human eye cannot detect. The effect is caused when the crystals absorb, then release, energy from the beams.
Hasenfus next picked up a sample of azurite, the mineral in his collection he is – for the moment, at least – most taken with. Pockets of the uneven stone gleamed a deep, true blue as he turned it in the light.
“When God created the world, he created some nice stuff. Most people don’t appreciate what’s in the ground,” he said.
Hasenfus knows his passion for rocks is unique, but he also has built a strong community of fellow enthusiasts, some of whom make up his client base.
About 80% of the customers who frequent Rock Shop are Mainers, and a good proportion of those are “serious collectors” and dedicated crystal enthusiasts, Hasenfus said. The rest are curious passers-by with whom Hasenfus enjoys sharing his collection and background knowledge.
Hasenfus previously worked with schools to teach workshops and share his fossil collection with children. However, he recently donated some of his most prized fossil specimens to Boston College, Hasenfus’s alma mater in Newton, Mass. Those items, which include several fossilized fish and a dinosaur egg, are now on display in Devlin Hall, Hasenfus said.
The current iteration of Hasenfus’s Rock Shop is the most recent in a long chain. He originally opened a storefront on Commercial Street in Boothbay Harbor in 1976 when he was working as a teacher.
“I wanted to do something else in the summertime, because I was just sitting there and twiddling my thumbs. So I opened the store because I had a big inventory and I sold most of that and it’s just grown and grown and grown,” he said.
The rock shop remained on Commercial Street for 14 years. After that, Hasenfus moved among different locations for a time, operating out of flea markets and several other locations for shorter durations.
He moved to his current location on Bath Road (Route One) about four years ago. The new space is larger, though it is still crowded with inventory, which includes also an array of antiques and other curiosities that intrigue Hasenfus.
Though his passion for rocks has become a job for Hasenfus, he insisted that his fascination remains, and has always been, simply a hobby. Hasenfus has a degree in history and government, with a minor in philosophy from Boston College. He previously taught industrial arts at a high school in Massachusetts.
Yet Hasenfus believes that hobbies are essential parts of a balanced life and credited his fascination with rocks with keeping him busy and continually learning over the years.
“The problem is, many people don’t have a hobby, and if you don’t have a hobby, when you get older, you’re going to be bored,” he said. “My hobby now has turned into a three-quarters-of-the-year job, which is great.”
The storefront is seasonal, as Hasenfus, who lives in Georgetown for much of the year, returns to Medford, Mass. in the winter months. But from May until mid-October, Rock Shop is open six days a week, except on days the Boston College football team is playing a home game, noted season-ticket-holder Hasenfus.
Rock Shop, at 731 Bath Road (Route One) in Wiscasset, is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sundays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For more information, call 449-2534.
