Mining for Feldspar

Think for a minute what it must have been like when they were mining the Havey back in the early 1900's. There were no dump trucks or excavators or air drills that they were using. It was mostly manual labor. At the Havey he had a crew of 10 Italian laborers working the mine for feldspar (feldspar is the coating that is on porcelain fixtures and china plates). They were drilling by hammering a steel drill bit and turning it a quarter turn with each hit. I don't know how long this took to drill a hole but I am sure it was just this side of forever. After the blast, the material was broken up with hammers and put in wheelbarrows and the waste would be piled up out of the way or dumped over an embankment. The feldspar was then loaded and transported approximately 3 miles by horse and wagon to the Littlefield Station in Auburn and ground down and put on train cars. If this was what mining was today I would not be there. With the mechanical help that is available today, the work that I can do by myself on a part time basis is more than their whole crew of ten men could do. If you are interested in finding out more about Maine feldspar production there are several USGS publications available if you do a search under Google's book section.

Miners working for feldspar in the early 1900's location unknown. This would have been very typical of the Havey mine operation.   Photo from The Maine Feldspar Company promotional brochure

A large derrick used for lifting. Probably a pile of feldspar in the foreground.  
Photo from The Maine Feldspar Company promotional brochure

A larger operation with a steam drill. You can also see the basket of material being lifted by the derrick.  
Photo from The Maine Feldspar Company promotional brochure                 

Feldspar has no value in Maine at this point in time even though the product is still used. There are cheaper sources to get it. Many times the miners would avoid the areas where the minerals were because the feldspar was of poorer quality in these areas. If you love Maine minerals and/or gemstones, just be thankful that there was an active feldspar industry up through the 1950's in Maine exposing many of the things that we treasure today. Some of the minerals and gems were just a waste product to the feldspar mining. If not for the feldspar mining, many mineral and gem areas may not have been discovered. People are still finding great things in some of these old abandoned workings.

A late winter

Winter 2007-2008 Winter had come and it was time to do some additional research on the Havey. The advent of the internet is a wonderful thing. I was able to start to track down some of the articles that had been printed about the mine. Some of the info I sent away for was in books, magazines and newspaper articles. It is much more efficient to sit behind the desk and look up some piece of history than to travel halfway across the country to find a possible paragraph.Of course, at this point in time I haven't been able to find all that I want, but they keep putting new info online and since much of the information I am looking for is from the beginning of the 1900's, it is going to take a while before it is available. Many times in finding one piece of information, it has lead to one or more other leads. My list of potential news sources keeps getting longer instead of shorter.

I had high ambitions of getting in and starting to mine early. Of course mother nature didn't care how eager I was. We had as much snow piled up as I can remember. I brought up the excavator in early March and started pushing the snow out of the road. It was over 4 feet deep in spots. I cleared out enough snow to be able to drive to the mine and turn the truck around. The spring started off cold which didn't help melt the snow. I did push some snow out of the way and this helped a bit. When Frank Perham and Barry Heath were over late last fall they had pointed out several areas that they thought looked promising. They also said that the indicators that I had for finding tourmaline were better than what they were mining at the moment. Why can't that cursed snow melt?

Road to mine. Spring 2008

Since the island area received a lot of sun I cleaned the snow off from it. This would give me a chance to look around it some more while I waited for the snow to melt in the rest of the quarry. There are some interesting indicators here, but I didn't find much. Since I had some time to kill I continued work on cleaning off the western part of the quarry as it also was getting the spring sun. This part of the Havey hadn't seen any work for almost 100 years. It would be interesting to see what they had buried.

Mid March 2008...looking across a corner of the Berry mine into the Havey

 Before I could make much progress I needed to get the excess material out of the mine.To kill two birds with one stone I decided to take the smaller material that was in the mine and use it to help build up my road into the mine. The road was fine when it was dry but it would rut up during the wet seasons. There was also the issue of water running down the road. I put in several culverts and built most of the road up a foot. There were only a couple of areas that had some minor problems at this point but it was good enough for a mine road. When I have more material there will be quite a bit more work I can do to help improve it. Being an excavation contractor I have high expectations of having a good access road. If any of you have driven into some of the quarries you know what a rough ride is. Some of this is for bragging rights on who has the worst road to their mine, and, of course, miners had much rather be mining than repairing roads.

Moving in the Excavator

Fall 2007 With the trees cut in the primary area to be worked it was time to bring in the machinary and start to remove the remnants of some of the past mining. The first thing was to get the excavator into the mine. I would need to level out one of the tailings piles and try to make a gradual slope down into the mine. This material was from the early 1900's mining era. Much of the pile actually turned out to be sandy material that would have been overburden.  In some areas of the quarry there is, and was, as much as 10' of overburden before getting to hard ledge. In the early 1900's this would have needed to be taken off with hand shovels and wheel barrows, and moved as short a distance as possible. I did separate out the rock and periodically looked through it to see if they might have missed something, but the pile was barren. It was a rather short process to get the excavator into the mine but it would be a much longer process removing all the existing loose rock out of the mine. After getting access in, one of the first things was to grab the brush with the excavator and haul it out of the mine. The excavator had a thumb, so getting the brush out was a pretty easy process. There were areas that needed to be smoothed out and  I needed to move some of the larger rock out of the way so that I could get to the brush that was piled up throughout the mine. This job went so much easier with equipment.

Sand and glacial till overburden in the Berry Quarry

Next was to start removing all the loose rock that was in the mine. I had figured that there was probably just a small amount of loose rock in the mine, but as I progressed, that didn't seem to be the case at all. In some places the loose material was 5 or 6' deep. With the material this deep it was going to create a large amount of material that would need to be moved out.  I started at one of the farthest points from my access road and started pulling the material toward the access road so that I could haul it out of the mine. At the same time I brought up a pump and started to wash down the areas that I was cleaning off. This would be a slow process, and, as I stated before I didn't know a lot about mining so I was doing a lot of inspecting. One thing about washing is that it brings out the color if there is any. Anytime I hit a piece of lepidolite, beryl, or tourmaline with the water, the color would jump right out. Of course, any of the tourmaline I was finding was of poor quality, with most of it being in muscovite. Still, it was exciting to see. It is exciting to see an area cleaned off, wondering what you will find. I started in an area I call 'the island'; this was an area left over from the Havey mining era. They had a derrick sitting on it at one time, and they had removed material all around it leaving this area high. Washing this area down I started to see areas of  lepidolite, cleavelandite, schorl, beryl, quartz, and feldspar. Upon closer inspection, it looked like the quartz area might be vuggy. This prompted me to bring out the generator and hammer drill to help loosen things up some. I did find a few small quartz crystals and some poorly formed smokies. This was a start. With some of the indicator minerals that were showing, I  was having visions of a tourmaline pocket next... but that was to be a while in coming.

Finally I had a good portion of the area washed down. I gave the godfather of Maine pegmatites, Frank Perham, a call to see if he would come over and give me some pointers. He showed up with his mining partner, Barry Heath, and took a tour. Frank has been around pegmatites his whole life, with his father starting the world famous mineral store, Perham's of Maine. Frank had been around in the mid 1970's when the Havey had been worked and was aware of what had transpired at the time. Rumor has it Frank may have even told Havey where to put in a blast or two in 1910.

I continued to wash and explore, but it was getting late in the year. The area of the mine where I have been working does not get very much sun during the winter hours. With nights well below freezing and the day time highs only getting near 40ºF, it was time to call it a season. I didn't have a tremendous amount to show for it, but a lot was learned and I had another year to look forward to when, hopefully, the Havey would start producing pockets of wonderful crystal specimens.

Photo by Encar Roda Robles.       Frank Perham and I, heavy in discussion