Winfield Trading Company
A family owned trading post between Gallup and Zuni Pueblo. Often overlooked by the public, collectors and museums know it well.
Winfield Trading Company has provided a vast array of quality hand-crafted jewelry, exquisite Navajo rugs, sculptures, baskets, pottery, Kachina dolls, paintings, and fetishes to individual collectors and businesses alike for more than 70 years. They purchase most finished products directly from craftsmen from many tribes, including the Apache, Cheyenne-Arapaho, Hopi, Navajo, Santa Domingo, and Zuni, supplying tourists, collectors, museums and retailers with an extraordinary selection of unique Native American crafts. Winfield Trading also has the largest collection of Lone Mountain Turquoise, both raw stone and jewelry. This third generation, family-owned business is owned and operated by Justin and Rebecca Winfield.
Mining Legacy
Winfield Trading's legacy began in Johnson County Arkansas, where Menless Winfield was born on April 14, 1916. He grew up working in his father's sawmills before migrating west to Phoenix to work lettuce fields. He spent a few decades working a variety of jobs, with a stint on the battlefields during WWII, before landing in the oil fields of New Mexico. While working the rigs in 1951, he encountered a fellow from the San Luis Valley in Colorado who wanted to sell his turquoise mine.
Three months later, Menless Winfield left the oil fields and became a turquoise miner in Colorado. He didn't have enough money to hire mining crews, so he used explosives and a bulldozer to convert the tunnels to pit mines, carefully picking through the crushed stone to extract turquoise nuggets. During one of his buying and selling trips to Gallup, Menless met "Rocky" Bill Wilson, a turquoise miner from Tonopah, Nevada. Bill sold Menless his turquoise mine, the Lone Mountain mine, in 1968.
Ultimately, his operation expanded to include the Villa Grove, Carrico Lake, and Lone Mountain mines. He sold the stone to jewelers from Santa Domingo, Navajo, and Zuni reservations. They used the stone to create jewelry. The relationships established with various tribes and craftsman continue to sustain Winfield Trading today.
Lone Mountain Turquoise
Among professional traders, Menless Winfield was revered as one of the most preeminent turquoise experts of his generation. He considered the turquoise from the Lone Mountain mine to be the highest quality turquoise in the world. The best of the hard blue turquoise has a hardness of 7 on the Mohs scale. The Mohs scale is a way to measure how resistant a mineral is to scratching. None of the turquoise from the Lone Mountain mine has been known to fade or change color. The mine was also his most productive, generating 6 to 14 pounds per day.
The stone mined from Lone Mountain is known as Black Matrix, Spider Web and Golden Matrix turquoise. It ranges in color from deep blue to robin's egg blue. Additionally, the Lone Mountain mine is the only mine in the world producing denderitic and fossil turquoise, two very rare types of turquoise. The denderitic turquoise was discovered in 1956, when nuggets of clear blue turquoise where split open to reveal dendrites similar to what is found in moss agate. Dendrite turquoise is produced by the crystallization of a foreign mineral when the turquoise is being formed, usually an oxide of manganese. These are distinct from the inclusions normally found in turquoise.
Turquoise Vault
Winfield Trading Company's turquoise vault is one of the largest collections of turquoise in the world. The vault hosts a huge selection of both cabbed and rough stones, with stones from numerous mines, including Sleeping Beauty, Royston, Kingman, Carrico Lake, Red Mountain, Smokey Valley, Lander Blue, as well as the Winfield family-owned mines in Villa Grove and Lone Mountain.
Schedule Appointment
Winfield Trading Company
1830 NM-602
Gallup, New Mexico 87301
(505) 778-5544
winfieldtradingco@gmail.com
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