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common are the black tourmalines; what they miss in color is compensated by their perfectly shaped crystals (plate 8). When Morgan’s lease expired, GinoVitali, an avid mineral collector from New Jersey, paid several visits to the quarry. Among numerous crystals, he found a light green transparent beryl measuring two by two inches and a cluster of pink beryls. To Vitali, this outcrop contained the “Queen of all Connecticut pegmatites.” 74 stories in stone Gems in QuarryTailings When studying geology in the old university town of Utrecht in the Netherlands, I spent many afternoons bent over drawers full of minerals, trying to learn their exotic names in preparation for an oral exam.Among the crystals were a small greenish beryl and a black tourmaline that stood out from the others because of their perfect shapes. .Their tags revealed that they had been collected in Haddam, Connecticut . Little did I know that I would live in that village a decade later and roam its ledges and woods in search of similar specimens. Collectable minerals can still be found in several outcrops and the tailings surrounding old quarries, but rockhounds have found almost all of the good specimens, and I never encountered any clear enough to be faceted into gems. While teaching atWesleyan University, I frequently took students and schoolchildren to the abandoned Strickland quarry/mine in Portland. One day, after a good rain had cleaned the dust of the minerals in a huge waste pile, a third-grader proudly showed me the treasures she had collected: yellow feldspars, smoky quartz, silver muscovite flakes, reddish-brown garnets, and a somewhat rounded dark green crystal that was about one inch long. Expecting that the crystal was a piece of tumbled bottle glass with which rockhounds liked to seed the area, hoping maliciously to trick fellow collectors, I said,“Nice, great crystals, keep looking,” and forgot about it. Sometimes, however, the mind makes curious circuits. Fifteen minutes or so later, I realized that I had seen a little black fleck inside her“glass.” Real crystals can contain inclusions,but glass usually does not.I quickly located the girl on the other side of the waste pile and asked to see her treasures again. Her small dirty hand fished once, twice, three times into deep pockets; at last, the green mineral appeared. I looked at it through a magnifying glass. Surprise! It was a beautiful green beryl crystal, part of it gem-quality. In one half, it contained an intergrown biotite flake, which suggests that the mineral had grown in the contact zone between the pegmatite and a biotite-rich gneiss. Cut and faceted, the other half would make a pretty little emerald. I told her to carefully wrap it in paper and surprise her mother. I returned many times to this site before it was turned into a golf course and most of the tailings were used to fill a deep mine shaft. I found quite a few beryls but never one with emerald quality. Among the collections made by John Winthrop Jr. in the lower Connecticut River Valley appeared some black crystals he had found inside a pegmatite that was most likely exposed in the Maromas section of Middletown. He named the crystal columbite, to honor Columbus and its source in America. His grandson sent Winthrop’s collection to England , where it lingered in museum drawers until Charles Hatchett, an English chemist, found the sample in 1801 and determined it to be an oxide of an undiscovered element he called columbium. A well-known mineralogist, William Wollaston, then compared the specimen with tantalum-oxide minerals and concluded that Hatchett’s columbium was the earlier-named element tantalum. Later still a German chemist, Heinrich Rose, decided that they were indeed different elements. He gave columbium a new name, niobium, which derives from Niobe, the daughter of Tantalus, because the elements named after them were so much alike. In this way a solid American name for a rare element with Connecticut origin was lost. The most complex mineral among the more than 140 that occur in Middlesex pegmatites is Samarskite, a rare earth oxide named after a Russian Colonel, Vasilii von Samarski. This amazing mineral contains yttrium, cesium, uranium, niobium, tantalum, and titanium. Its velvety black radioactive crystals are opaque and were once fashioned into cabochons, though this is not the best precious stone to carry close to one’s heart! Lithic Resources: Soapstone and Quartz Southern New England had ice-free summers by around...

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