On the last weekend of August, when the ice is long gone from the Douglas N. Everett Arena on Loudon Road and the building sits in its summer "dry floor" mode, a different kind of glitter takes over. For two days the ice rink that carries Concord's hockey teams through the New Hampshire winter is laid over with tables, trays, and lit display cases instead, transformed into a vast field of stone for the Capital Mineral Club's annual Gem, Mineral, and Jewelry Show. On Saturday, August 29 and Sunday, August 30, 2026, the club will again fill the arena with minerals, fossils, gemstones, jewelry, carvings, and demonstrations, welcoming collectors, families, and the merely curious for $5 a head, with children under twelve admitted free.
The show is the public face of a club that has been quietly educating New Hampshire about its own rocky bones since the early 1960s. The Capital Mineral Club, organized in 1961 and a member of the Eastern Federation of Mineralogical and Lapidary Societies since 1986, describes itself as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit devoted to education in mineralogy, geology, and the subjects that grow out of them. That mission sounds straightforward, but the club's actual footprint runs deeper than a twice-a-year show. It has given grants to college students for field camp study and for thesis research on New Hampshire mineralogy, sponsored lectures for schools, and mounted informative displays around the state. Its members gather on the second Saturday of each month from September through June at the NH Sno-Shakers Clubhouse in Canterbury, swapping specimens, hearing speakers, and keeping their newsletter, Crystals & Cabs, alive.
That newsletter, with its running columns and its volunteer editorship that has long been anchored by club mainstay Steffen Hermanns, reflects a particular kind of institution: an amateur scientific society that has quietly become a serious authority on the minerals beneath a state famous for its granite. New Hampshire bills itself as the Granite State, and the rocks club members chase tell the state's whole story in mineral form. Beryl, the official state mineral, is a gemstone found in the granite that laces the state's northern pegmatite deposits. Smoky quartz, a crystal common in New Hampshire's granite, was adopted as the official state gem in the same 1985 legislative session that recognized beryl and granite itself. That's what the club's annual show puts on display: not just pretty stones but the very stuff of the Granite State's geological identity.
The club's own website is a quiet tribute to that identity, illustrated with finds from particular New Hampshire places. A beryl from the McGinnis Mine. Gold panned from the Wild Ammonoosuc River. Pyrite from the Route 110 "Drummer" locality. Rutile, and soapstone from the Richmond quarry. Schorl and magnetite and arfvedsonite from the old Rice mine. Those are the names that members speak the way other people speak of neighborhood streets, and they get shared in New England's summer show season, which is crowded with regional gatherings.
The Capital Mineral Club show sits in a band of late-summer mineral events across New England, from the Champlain Valley show in Burlington, Vermont in mid-July to the East Coast Gem, Mineral and Fossil Show at the Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield, Massachusetts in mid-August. Concord's dates, anchored each year around the end of August, give New Hampshire rockhounds their own homegrown weekend, a dry-floor event that fits neatly into the arena's schedule. The arena spends its winters as an ice rink and its late spring, summer, and early fall as a dry-floor venue for exactly this sort of show — an 18,000-square-foot exhibition space beneath 45-foot ceilings that in the summer months hosts everything from model train shows to craft fairs and gun shows.
The arena itself has a history worth knowing, and it adds texture to what might otherwise be a straightforward gathering. Built in 1965 to designs by the Manchester architecture firm Koehler & Isaak, the arena was named for Douglas N. Everett, a Concord native and 1932 Olympic silver medalist whose skill at skating and hockey, along with his civic and business leadership in the city, made him the obvious honoree. The original proposal came from a not-for-profit corporation formed by Concord citizens in the 1930s to build an indoor skating arena; the building finally opened in 1965 and was formally dedicated that December in a ceremony capped by a Dartmouth hockey win over New Hampshire. The City of Concord acquired the arena in 1981 and has run it ever since. So when the mineral club sets up its long tables under those high ceilings in late August, it does so inside a building that has spent six decades being Concord's communal room for everything from championship hockey to model trains and antiques.
That mix of the institutional and the intimate is part of the show's character. Dealers of mineral specimens, cabochons, custom jewelry, and tourmaline from vendors such as Seaside Stones share space with club member displays and live demonstrations. For families, the generous admission — children under twelve free with a paying adult — makes it an easy August outing. For serious collectors it's a chance to handle New England pegmatite material face-to-face and to compare notes with the people who dug it out of the earth themselves.
The show is also a living demonstration of the club's reason for existing. The same organization that funnels scholarships into college geology departments is the one standing behind tables with quartz and feldspar and telling you, at no charge, which lump of gray rock is worth keeping. It's education by a different door. A kid who walks in with a wriggle of quartz and a mystery rock in their pocket can leave an hour later with a name for it — and possibly a way into the collection for life.
Behind the 2026 show stands a club that has quietly worked a daily miracle of stewardship. Organized in 1961 and incorporated a few years later, it has outlasted generations of members, moved meeting spots from the Salvation Army building on Clinton Street to its current home at the Sno-Shakers Clubhouse, and continued to do the thankless work of a volunteer society: maintaining a newsletter, hosting speakers, running scholarships, and hauling boxes of stones to an arena every summer to share them. That level of continuity gives the event a weight beyond a weekend craft fair. It's the annual outward face of a 65-year-old institution that has never stopped believing that a good piece of the Earth is worth a look.
For visitors, the practical details are simple. Doors open Saturday, August 29 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, August 30 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., at 15 Loudon Road in Concord, just off Interstate 93. Adults pay $5; children under 12 get in free with an adult. But the event's real inventory is broader than any entrance fee. It's the chance to stand in a building that for six decades has been the city's gathering place, at the table of a club that has quietly watched over New Hampshire's rocks for just as long, and to see the Granite State the way its own enthusiasts do — one sparkling fragment at a time.