Hale Quarry (Andrews Quarry; Glastonbury Quarry), Portland, Middlesex County, Connecticut, USAi

Regional Level Types
Hale Quarry (Andrews Quarry; Glastonbury Quarry)	Quarry
Portland	- not defined -
Middlesex County	County
Connecticut	State
USA	Country

A quarry in granite pegmatite active from 1902 to 1917 and from 1938 to 1992. This is one of the longest operating quarries in a single pegmatite in Connecticut, almost 70 years. The workings gradually extended southward from the northern tip of the north-south oriented pegmatite and it ended up being about 450 meters long by the time it closed.

The Hale Quarry is often confused with the neighboring but much smaller and earlier Andrews Quarry http://www.mindat.org/loc-23306.html that was apparently known as the Hale Quarry when it operated in a different pegmatite from about 1881 to 1900. For example, the large beryl on display at Wesleyan University shown at http://www.mindat.org/photo-77161.html and collected in 1896 is, for that time, correctly labeled "Hale Quarry" but this older Hale Quarry was later known as the Andrews Quarry after the "new" Hale Quarry opened in 1902. Some references written after 1902 refer to Andrews as the "old Hale quarry". Famous scientific analyses by Hillebrand (1890) on gases emanating from uraninite and radiometric age dating of monazite and uraninite by Boltwood (1907) used samples attributed to what was then called the Hale Quarry, but is now called Andrews. Foye (1922) gives both names but is clearly describing Andrews quarry, which is well known for its monazite crystals.

Zodac (1941) and Little (1942) refer to the Hale Quarry as the Andrews Quarry, but Zodac points out that "Due to the fact that the property belongs to Herbert Hale, it is also known as the Hale Quarry; and furthermore, because of its close proximity to the Glastonbury Township Line, it has also been called the Glastonbury Quarry." Zodac (1941) includes a map that distinguishes between the quarries and the article carefully points out which minerals occur at each. See the Andrews Quarry mindat.org page for more details.

The operating history of the "new" Hale Quarry involved several entities. In May 1902, the Hales leased their property to Harry Andrews who owned a feldspar mill close to the quarry site. In 1906, after Andrews' mill burned; he began selling quarried material to the Eureka Flint & Spar Company, a subsidiary of Eureka Mining and Operating Company, for milling. Andrews continued operating the Hale quarry until World War I when labor costs became too high. In 1916 the workings extended only about 23 meters inside the northern quarry entrance. In 1938, the Hale family leased the quarry to Eureka Mining and Milling Company, another subsidiary of Eureka Mining and Operating Company, which operated it until The Feldspar Corporation of North Carolina took over the lease of the property in the early 1960s and began to mine pegmatite underground. In the 1980s, they blasted the roofs in and worked the quarry as an open cut. The material was being trucked to The Feldspar Corporation’s mill in Middletown and operations continued until that mill closed at the end of 1991. There is no active quarrying going on today, the quarry is flooded, and the area is restricted due to explosives storage by the owner.

Microcline from this site was finely-ground and used in scouring powder made by the Bon Ami Company. It was later used for porcelain glaze.

According to Stugard (1958) the pegmatite is zoned based on mineralogy and texture. The wall zone makes up the eastern three-quarters of the pegmatite; it is medium-grained microcline perthite-quartz pegmatite, with sub-ordinate albite and muscovite. On the western side a border zone of quartz-albite-mica pegmatite, from 0 to 45 feet thick, has striking mammillary structures and bands of tourmaline-bearing rock. The mammillary structures contain bands rich in quartz, feldspar, and mica. Red bands are common and have been attributed to a high garnet content, but the color is almost entirely due to a surface discoloration of feldspar grains. The garnets present are very small and constitute less than 0.01 percent of the rock. This fine-grained, banded, aplitic pegmatite is also described by London (1985) who also mentions graphic quartz textures in individual very-coarse-grained microcline crystals and block microcline-beryl-quartz pods.

In the early 1940s museum quality specimens of uraninite, meta-autunite, metatorbernite, and uranophane were removed from the quarry. Little (1942), calling it "Andrews Quarry", said that the meta-autunite had bright green fluorescence and sometimes formed rings around uranophane or uraninite. The metatorbernite sometimes covered the specimens so thickly as to give them a solid green appearance. Also found were platy iridescent masses of pyrrhotite, pyrite and chalcopyrite, which Schooner (1958) describes as coming from the Hale Quarry.

Jarnot (1989) documents the tapiolite and pyrochlore found here. There were only two specimens.

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References