Our readers nominated more than 50 crafters for mentions in the magazine. Bob and Mary McIntire’s business was touted more than a half dozen times.
When Robert and Mary McIntire of Stuarts Draft, Virginia, started Treasure Tree Wire Wrapped Jewelry in 1998, they wanted the name to represent the branching interconnectedness of land and community that personal, organic jewelry brings. They hardly realized how well their past prepared them for their business enterprise.
Bob’s childhood in Massachusetts and Mary’s in the Philippines and France brought outside influences to their thinking. Not only did they become aware of the broad spectrum of people, which made networking natural, but Mary’s life in a military family and experience with her grandmother in Abingdon making her own clothes emphasized networking’s working component.
Treasure Tree formed after Bob hauled his father’s trove of minerals to Virginia to satisfy his own son’s interest in geology and Mary employed her high school home economics skills in cutting stones.
The McIntires subsequently earned certifications in wire wrapping, cabochons, faceting and other aspects of jewelry crafting from the William Holland School of Lapidary Arts in Young Harris, Georgia.
The concept of Treasure Tree is freeing people from the arbitrary synthetic rubies and sapphires and creating gems closer to their lives in the Shenandoah Valley. The community offers whatever has meaning and the McIntires transform it into jewelry. Mary says that the turning point of the business came when they dedicated themselves completely to what people wanted and abandoned their own agenda.
“I don’t feel like we’re selling anything,” says Mary. “We just talk to people.”
Much of the source material for Treasure Tree comes from a small Blue Ridge radius near the business. Pink and green unakite originates with a landowner near Crabtree Falls.
Nelsonite, the freshly anointed State Stone, hides in secluded nooks in Nelson County, where ancient forces graced it with valuable titanium.
Even the owner of Rebecca Furnace, a 19th-century iron furnace that may soon become a historic site near neighboring Lexington, is a source. Through the caretaker of the extensive site, the McIntires learned the owner wanted antique jewelry fashioned from glass slag, a byproduct of his property’s former industry.
One client has a two-generation mineral bond through the family barn. She requested bracelets fashioned from its limestone foundation. Part of the inspiration came from her daughter’s Hokie Stone, decorative limestone mined at Virginia Tech as a cottage industry.
So what is trending in the realm of organic jewelry? “Fairy stones,” says Mary. The popular oddities shaped like Maltese crosses come from a creek bed in Stuart, Virginia’s Fairy Stone State Park.
On a visit to the creek bed, the McIntires encountered a little girl in a dress sitting among the gravels. She had a fine collection of fairy stones she had gathered. She looked up and asked, “Do you believe in fairies?” She went on: ”I am having tea with one right now.” Finding the girl gone when they returned, they looked in vain for a car that could have brought her there.
At a business seminar, a fellow attendee noticed the Treasure Tree jewelry Mary wears and asked where she bought it. When she explained that it came from source stone at Fairy Stone State Park, he exclaimed, “You’ve been there?” The topic of the little girl came up and he offered, “I saw her too.” Treasure Tree networking goes a long ways out.
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The story above is from our November/December 2019 issue.
