Franklin
Mill Site
from
minddat.org ..."This is not a mineral occurrence
locality. It is now the site of an apartment complex
for senior citizens built in 2007. All material
formerly on this dump has been mechanically sieved
and removed and put in a special area at the
Franklin Mineral Museum. This is an excellent
example of conservatory co-operation between a
construction company and the Franklin Mineral
Museum.
This
locality was a mineral dump near the end of Mill
Street and abutting the ore railroad tracks entering
the former Palmer #2 Mill. The "Mill Site dump" was
known for many years previous to the apartment
building construction and supervised field trips
were permitted in the mid-1980s. During the
construction of the apartment building, the dump was
sieved using a 5 x 5 cm grid shaker and all of the
mineral specimens of "usable" size were trucked to
the Franklin Mineral Museum property, where these
minerals are now being added to the collecting site
where museum members and visitors are receiving
controlled access to the minerals, thus ensuring
that fresh minerals are available to mineral
collectors and by extension adding to the long-term
vitality of the Franklin Mineral Museum's
facilities.
The historical lore of the Mill Site Dump is that
the final approach to the Palmer #2 Mill (built in
1898) was over a trestle about 8-12 meters from the
rails to ground level. Allegedly, the trestle
shifted and was perceived as unstable and management
ordered a rapid dumping of rock to bring the fill
level up to the railroad tracks and thus avert a
long term mill shutdown. Lore further suggests that
the ore picking table in the Mill was reversed so
that any rock in the Mill was diverted back to the
trestle supports. Further shipments of blasted rock
of all kinds, both dump-grade and ore-grade, were
taken from the Parker Shaft and elsewhere to fill
the entire depression up to track level. The
presence of margarosanite, hardystonite, and other
desirable species that have been recovered from Mill
Site rock supports the folklore.
Geology
The ore bodies at the
Sterling Hill mine lie within a formation called the
Reading Prong massif; the ores are contained within
the Franklin Marble. This was deposited as limestone
in a Precambrian oceanic rift trough. It
subsequently underwent extensive metamorphosis
during the Grenville orogeny, approximately 1.15
billion years ago. Uplift and erosion during the
late Mesozoic and the Tertiary exposed the ore
bodies at the surface; the glaciers of the
Pleistocene strewed trains of ore-bearing boulders
for miles to the south, in places creating deposits
large enough to be worked profitably.
In
the area of the Franklin and Sterling Hill mines,
357 types of minerals are known to occur; these make
up approximately 10% of the minerals known to
science. Thirty-five of these minerals have not been
found anywhere else.[9] Ninety-one of the minerals
fluoresce. There are 35 miles (56 km) of tunnels in
the mine, going down to 2,065 feet (629 m) below the
surface on the main shaft and 2,675 feet (815 m) on
the lower shaft. As of 2017, other than the very top
level of the mine (<100 ft), the entire lower
section has been flooded due to underground water
table and hence no longer accessible. The mine
remains at 56 °F (13 °C) constantly.
Sterling
Hill Tour & Museum of Fluorescence
The
tour spends about 30 minutes inside the Exhibit hall
which contains a wide variety of mining memorabilia,
mineralogical samples, fossils, and meteorites. It
then leads into the mine for a 1,300 feet (400 m)
walk on level ground through the underground mine.
The walk goes through a new 240 feet (73 m) section
called the Rainbow tunnel which they blasted in 1990
using 49 blasts and at a cost of $2 a foot. In the
Rainbow room, short wave UV lights are turned on to
demonstrate the entire tunnel and various samples
glowing with fluorescence. The mine is also home to
the Ellis Astronomical Observatory, the Thomas S.
Warren Museum of Fluorescence, and a collection of
mining equipment.
The museum periodically arranges public mineral
collecting sessions as well as more private and
behind the scene events for local geology clubs."
Franklin
Mineral Museum
Franklin,
New Jersey, and its close neighbor, Ogdensburg, are
the homes of the world’s most famous zinc mines. The
zinc ore here was fabulously rich, averaging nearly
25% zinc by weight, and there was a lot of it; over
the years these two mines produced 33 million tons
of ore. By any measure these two orebodies and the
metamorphosed limestone that encloses them comprise
one of the top ten mineral localities in the world,
a fact known to mineral collectors and professional
mineralogists alike.
The
Franklin orebody in particular is famous for its
spectacular fluorescent minerals and abundance of
rare mineral species. Indeed, nothing closely
resembling it has been found anywhere else on our
planet, save its sister orebody at Sterling Hill,
2.5 miles away in Ogdensburg.
By
the early 1950s the Franklin mine was nearing the
end of its life, and in 1954 the last of the ore was
raised to the surface. Many in the community at that
time wished to preserve the heritage of this great
locality. Miners sold specimens to collectors
out of their basements, scientific papers on the
deposits continued to be published, and, in 1959, a
group of collectors banded together to form the
Franklin-Ogdensburg Mineralogical Society (FOMS),
still in existence today. One of the stated goals of
FOMS from the start was to assist in the founding
and support of a museum in Franklin dedicated to the
local minerals.
Enter
the Franklin Kiwanis club, which took on the
challenge of creating just such a museum as a
community project. Five years later, thanks to the
efforts of the Kiwanians, some of whom were also
FOMS members, the Franklin Mineral Museum opened its
doors to the public.
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