“Her stone stays whole.” Why a 73-year-old stone cutter is selling his last 240 butterflies at a special price

His hands can no longer hold the saw. A Dallas wholesaler offered to buy every slab he has left by the pound. Thurman Pickrell turned him down and chose something else.

Mount Ida, Arkansas. On the shelves behind Thurman Pickrell’s rock shop sit flat boxes of small stone butterflies: purple amethyst, blush-pink rose opal, deep blue sodalite, golden tiger’s eye. Each pair of wings was cut by hand from a single slab of stone, so the pattern runs from one wing straight into the other.

There are two hundred forty of them, and there will never be more. At seventy-three, Thurman’s hands can no longer hold the saw.

This spring a wholesaler from Dallas wanted all of it, every finished butterfly and every uncut slab, by the pound. The plan: slice the stone paper-thin, back it with resin, dye the dull pieces bright and sell them as “crystal butterflies” in gift shops for up to $140.

Thurman said no.

Instead he is selling the butterflies exactly as they came off his bench, straight to the people who will set them in a window. For $59.

The boy who found the mountain’s secret

Mount Ida calls itself the Quartz Crystal Capital of the World, and the Ouachita Mountains around it are full of the stuff. Thurman grew up here, the son of a timber cutter.

“I was fifteen, walking a logging road above my granddad’s place with my cousin, and saw a glassy tip sticking out of the clay bank,” he says. “I dug it out with Mama’s garden trowel, and my cousin snapped a picture with his little Kodak. I still have it. Clear as window glass, six sides, a point on the end. Nobody made that. The mountain did. I never got over it.”

He learned to cut and polish what he and others dug out of those hills. In 1985 he opened a small rock shop on the highway with a cutting room in the back. He has been at the saw ever since.

Imogene, and what a butterfly means

His wife, Imogene, taught second grade in Mount Ida for thirty-one years. She was no rock hound, until the day he held a slice of amethyst up to the kitchen window and the light came through the purple.

From then on, every February, they drove the old truck to the gem show in Tucson. She picked the slabs. He cut them. And she kept a stone book: where every piece came from, and what each stone has stood for over the centuries.

She loved the real thing, too. Every fall, when the monarchs drift south through the Ouachitas on their way to Mexico, they rested in the milkweed she planted for them. Her mother had taught her the old Ozark saying: a butterfly at your window means good news is on its way.

After that she wanted a butterfly from every good stone that came through the shop. Together they set aside the best slabs of eight stones for butterflies and nothing else. Thurman sold a few to regulars and to galleries in Hot Springs, where they went for $85 apiece.

When the house went quiet

In the spring of 2024, after forty-seven years of marriage, Imogene passed away. For months Thurman did not unlock the cutting room.

One sleepless November morning he finally went out to the bench. Her stone book still lay there, open at the page where she had listed the slabs saved for butterflies.

“She had planned every one of them,” he says. “The least I could do was cut them. And she always said a butterfly means starting over. If anybody needed one, it was me.”

For a year and a half he cut every morning. Four hundred eighty wings. Two hundred forty butterflies, each one different, because no two slabs of stone ever grew the same way.

One slab, one pair, and a test you can do at home

Every butterfly starts as one slice of natural stone. Thurman traced both wings side by side, cut them out together, carved the veins by hand and polished them until the pattern came alive. Once a slab is cut, that pattern exists nowhere else.

Imogene always told customers what each stone stood for, “not as a promise, just as a reminder”: amethyst for a calm, clear head, rose opal for a soft heart, sodalite for honest words, tiger’s eye for courage, agate for new beginnings, red gum flower for warmth, apatite for the push to start something and yellow calcite for a lighter heart.

Telling real stone from a copy is easy. Real stone is cold to the touch and heavier than it looks; resin feels warm and light. Then hold it to a window. On amethyst, red gum flower and yellow calcite, the light glows through the edges of the wings.

“Look at the cut edge,” says Dr. Annelise Brokaw, a retired mineralogy professor from Fayetteville. “In real stone the pattern runs all the way through. A printed or dyed copy stops at the surface.”

“Not one more slab”

This spring the X-rays came back from a clinic in Hot Springs. Arthritis has worn through the joints at the base of both thumbs, and a tremor in his right hand has been getting worse for two years. His grip is barely a third of what it once was.

It is not only his hands. By ten in the morning he is spent, and by noon he can hardly lift a slab onto the bench.

“A hand that shakes and a diamond blade don’t belong in the same room,” the doctor told him. “Not one more slab.”

The offer from Dallas

Word of the Pickrell stock had reached a crystal and home-décor wholesaler near Dallas through dealers at Tucson. A week later the buyer stood on Thurman’s gravel lot. Four dollars a pound, cash. For rough stone, a fair price.

Then Thurman asked what would happen to it. Sliced as thin as it would go, glued to resin, the dull pieces dyed bright, cut into butterflies by machine.

That evening his son Wade had a better idea: sell the butterflies Thurman had already cut, straight from his bench, with no wholesaler and no gift shop taking a cut.

$59 for a butterfly that exists only once

Each butterfly is about 4 to 5 inches wide and stands on a slim silver steel stand shaped like a butterfly’s body, packed in a padded box. Choose from eight stones: amethyst, rose opal, sodalite, tiger’s eye, agate, red gum flower, apatite and yellow calcite.

The price is $59: less than a resin copy in a gift shop, and below the $85 the galleries charged. It covers the stand, the box and the postage, with no markup on top.

“I want these in the windows of people who are starting something,” Thurman says. “A new house, a new job, a first year without somebody. That’s what Imogene would have wanted.”

What buyers say

Word spread among rock hounds first. Then it reached people who had never owned a stone in their lives.

The gift that says “begin again”

Mothers buy them for daughters moving out. Friends buy them for friends after a divorce. Grandparents buy them for graduations. Widows buy them for themselves. A butterfly says something without a card, and a stone one never fades.

The last 240

Those boxes hold everything that is left from forty years of slabs Imogene picked. Thurman’s hands and his strength are done, and there is nobody else at the saw. When the last butterfly is packed, it is over.

Wade packs every order by hand, and every butterfly comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. “Hold it to the window,” Thurman says. “If it doesn’t make you smile, send it back.”