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Collecting in Virginia
You are here: MineralCollecting.org >> Posted Articles >> Article 23

by Tom Tucker (Tom Tucker is a well known and enthusiastic collector, dealer, geologist and MNCA member who lives in Silver Gate, Montana)
This article appeared in the November 1998 issue of the Mineral Mite, the newsletter of the Micromounters of the National Capital Area in Washington, D. C.

COLLECTING IN VIRGINIA, SPRING, 1998.

I arrived in Virginia in late February, looking forward to a variety of mineral collecting. Two days later I was out panning for gold with Paul Smith on Contrary Creek. We had our normal success there, a few flakes, but all of them large enough to see. For those who are interested, there is an article about the historic archaeology of the Contrary Creek area in the Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Virginia, March 1998. It seems that what was suspected to be an old iron mine area was actually the Tinder Gold Mine. We could probably have told them that. The following week I checked out two areas of recent rock moving. In Culpeper county where Lee Highway (US Route 211) crosses the Fauquier/Culpeper county line at the Rappahannock River there is a small quarry area that was used during the construction of a new bridge at that point last year, The rock is a metamorphic schist with quite a few vugs. The state geologic maps indicates that this is in the Catoctin group of metabasalts, but I suspect we're really in the Charlottesville formation of the Lynchburg group, being some sort of metasediments. The same rock and vugs are found at some new construction at the South Wales Mini-Storage business on the eastside of county road 622, three quarters of a mile to the southwest. In each case there are numerous vugs up to an inch or two long, but the only mineral I see is some sort of mica in tiny crystals (chlorite?)

My brother mentioned a new excavation near Front Royal, so a couple of days later I went to take a look. The relatively small exposure is in a hillside cut, on the eastside of US Route 340/522, on the north side of the firstv hill north of the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. This is a couple of hundred yards north of the road to the east of the Riverton Quarries. They had bulldozed the hillside, and filled in the low spots in the process of making the site attractive as a commercial piece of real estate. The exposed Edinburg Limestone is well fractured, and has numerous while calcite veins, slickensides, and a variety of vugs. The only minerals are uninteresting calcite, and "Herkimer Diamond" like quartz crystals up to a half inch long. Similar crystals-occur in the hillside northeast of the turnoff to the Riverton Quarries, and some have been brought to the Micromount Conference freebie tables in the past. The excavated site is now for sale, so it you want to own your own crystal collecting site.... . I did obtain permission from the Riverton Quarry for a geology visit to their operation, but not for mineral collecting, and then I never had a chance to take them up on it. They did say that clubs have been allowed into the quarries in the past.

When driving south of Front Royal on US Route 522 one passes through road cuts in the Catoctin Formation metabasalts or greenstone. I'd seen crystals here a couple of years ago, but didn't have a rock hammer with me at the time. The outcrops are obvious, along each side of the road from one to three miles south of the intersection with Virginia Route 55. In some areas there are slickenside surfaces covered with small patches of an asbestos-like mineral, tremolite? Interesting but not real pretty. Other areas have numerous quarter-inch in diameter vugs totally filled with a pinkish feldspar, quartz, and bright green epidote. They would make real nice specimens if only the vugs had some open space. I did find one larger vug with a thumbnail sized piece of quartz with a quarter-inch wide epidote crystal. Lots of potential but no prizes yet. If only we had a quarry in this rock.

Another day in March I went to the Front Royal area to scout out the location of the old Sealock copper mine. In Mineral Resources of Virginia, (Watson, 1907), is mentioned "An examination of the dumps at many of the openings on this property by the writer in 1905 showed many beautiful specimens of copper ore." The ore included native copper chalcopyrite, cuprite, malachite and azurite. Who could resist? I attempted to reach the area from the north, near Linden, but ran into gated roads, no trespassing signs, and totally washed out roads. I haven't tried it from the southeast yet, but the best approach may be from the Appalachian Trail, and since I haven't found the exact site yet, I'm not sure about the land ownership, though it appears to be private. There are numerous home developments in the area. Along one washed out road I did locate some rock with vugs up to an eighth of an inch, but no crystals.

One day in April I went to Hayfield, west of Winchester on US Route 50 to investigate a report of celestite. In a description of a stratigraphic section, found in Geology and Mineral Resources of Frederick County, Bulletin 80 of the Virginia Division of Mineral Resources, "vugs lined with celestite" are mentioned several times. It seems W. H. Rogers at UVA did his entire masters thesis on the celestite in the Hayfield area, in 1964. I'm trying to access the thesis at the UVA library, but they are kept in a basement of some other building, and it takes a couple of days to get it. It should be available next week. I searched out the old locality, the Stodler Quarry, about a mile and a quarter northwest of Hayfield, and a half-mile or so off of the highway. Apparently the quarry was only active during the early '60s, providing material for the widening and reconstruction of Route 50. It is now in the back yard of a modern rambler home belonging to one Mr. Gary Beckly. He readily gave permission to examine the old quarry which is perhaps a hundred by forty yards, and up to fifty feet or so deep. Most of the quarry is full of water, up to 20 feet deep, but the walls can be accessed if you are careful. I asked Gary how often he had requests from persons wishing to visit the quarry. He got them regularly from local folks wanting to swim, but in the ten years he's owned the site, I'm the first that has ever wanted to look at rocks or geology. Where are all you folks who ought to be checking out mineral localities? The quarry was mostly discouraging. The rock is weathered since it has been over 30 years since it was active. I did find one promising area, 20 feet up the wall, above 20 feet of water. I little work exposed a nice thumbnail specimen of eighth-inch celestine crystals, sharp, good color, and with one more whack of the hammer it pops off and down into 20 feet of water. Everything you drop while collecting ends up at the bottom of the water. I think that's a law. Maybe related to gravity or something. And since you are clinging to the side of the quarry wall, it is very difficult to keep everything in place. Summer collecting trips could be interesting, since if you slipped just a little, you'd end up with a deep dive, and a swim to the far side of the quarry. Of course winter trips could be interesting too, just more uncomfortable.

I ended up with thirty pounds of rock to take home, and after breaking it up, I came away with a half dozen small for-the-record-only type pieces of celestine. It's interesting that most of the celestine localities in Virginia are in Silurian age rocks, which I think might be the same age as the more famous localities in Michigan.

Later in April, Paul Smith and Jack Nelson joined me for a trip to Shenandoah County. First we checked out a reported quartz crystal locality south of the Food Lion store, on the eastern side of US Route 11, just north of Strasburg. Checking an area north of the store we found only one or two small crystals, despite lots of recently excavated ground. Moving to an area south of the store, under a large power line, we found a few more crystals, but nothing much to get excited about. On examining my six small crystals when I got home, it turns out one is interesting. Under the scope, the base of the crystal can be seen to contain a phantom of a quartz pseudomorph of some isometric mineral. The cube has a smaller cube extending out from one face, all as a phantom. The pseudomorph doesn't look like pyrite, but more like fluorite. An interesting specimen from an ordinary locality. The host rock here is also the Edinburg Limestone, as at the quartz locality in Front Royal. The three of us then headed west to Mineral Ridge, on the Frederick and Shenandoah county line, near the west edge of the counties. I'd found the locality a couple of years ago, and after getting ownership data from the courthouse in Winchester, I obtained permission to collect from the owner, a real estate developer who may use the area for hunting. One purpose in collecting the area is to locate other phosphate minerals. How come in a mine full of iron and manganese oxides, we find only the aluminum phosphate? Mineral Ridge was intermittently mined for manganese between 1834 and 1957. While much of the three quarter-mile long open pit lies in Frederick county, the material we collected comes from the south end in Shenandoah County. One can drive up a dirt road to the mine, past the old office building and the mill, which still contains a variety of equipment. Then it is less than a 100-yard walk into the overgrown pit. The area where we can collect wavelite is the only place along the pit walls where manganese ore can still be seen. It may be that this resource was not mined due to the high phosphorous content, thereby leaving easy-to-collect specimens for us. Paul had been to the mine several years ago and collected from a different area, east of the access road below the area of the mill. The minerals are found in a brecciated chert residuum from the Devonian age New Scotland limestone. The white wavelite crystals up to an eighth inch long are found in fractures in the chert, or in vugs in the manganese oxides, The material in fractures forms rosettes up to three eighths inch in diameter, and some large specimens can be had covered with them. The more esthetic material consists of scattered crystals and small clusters in the manganese ore. They provide numerous beautiful specimens. The property is posted and permission should be obtained from the owner. Other collecting related trips included two sessions panning gold in Rock Run with Jack Nelson. On one weekday trip we met a local government employee who was taking his lunch hour to go gold panning. Is this big city life great or what? And of course there was a trip to Bull Run Quarry with the Gem and Mineral Hunters of Virginia Club.

On the way back to Montana, I stopped at Sugar Grove, West Virginia to collect from the basalt sill so well known for its great micro minerals. I have just learned of another basalt outcrop a few miles away which may be equally interesting, and I'm anxious to return for a look see. Finally I met son Chris at Hall's Gap, Kentucky to collect from the famous millerite locality. The roadside excavation has undercut the limestone cliff about fifteen feet, and the large open joints in the overhanging rock make one be careful, work fast, or get paid up life insurance. It appears that someone is trying to discourage collecting by backfilling the main collecting area with rubble. Chris found a few geodes with minor millerite and "green" needles, and a fair number of geodes with pyrite and chalcopyrite. I didn't find much. I collected mostly in the easy to collect areas on both sides of the highway, and while I had perhaps a hundred geodes, none contained millerite, and only a few had pyrite. We did discover that in the small creek just north of the main road cut, there are hundreds of large quartz geodes, typical of Mississippian rocks throughout the mid-west. Some of them are up to nearly eighteen inches in diameter. Now wouldn't that be nice full of millerite. It looks like the area could take a lot of exploring for minerals.

I then left for home while Chris made one more stop near Bedford, Indiana for barite in geodes. He collected for five hours in POURING rain, and got one fair geode. He says the rock is hard. And he did take a tourist tour of a coal mine in southern Illinois. The hour-long tour lasted over four hours, just Chris and the retired miner-guide. It was a great tour, but no minerals.

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