THE 8TH ANNUAL NEW ENGLAND MINERAL CONFERENCE

 

 

 

The 8^th annual New England Mineral Conference,

Grand Summit Hotel, Newry, Maine

May 19-21, 2023

A GUEST POST BY MARK IVAN JACOBSON

 

              After a covid-imposed hiatus of four years, the New England Mineral Conference (NEMC, pronounced “Nemic’) restarted its celebration of New England minerals, and associated vocational and avocational mining and prospecting. This two-day meeting provides reports on new discoveries, updates on current mining activities, displays of some of the area’s rarest and most beautiful minerals, and a banquet announcing the Annual Mineralogical Heritage Award recognizing influential local mineral person(s).

            Details on this conference may be found on NEMC's website at  https://www.nemineral.org/.  This year's meeting, as in past years, was held at the Grand Summit Resort Hotel and Conference Center, Sunday River ski resort, Newry, Maine, on May 19-21, 2023.  Next year’s meeting will be held May 17-19, 2024. The conference is the successor to the former Maine Mineral Symposium which had been held annually for more than a decade in Augusta, Maine. With a change in leadership, led by Jeffrey Morrison, the symposium, now under a geographically broader name, restarted at an Auburn motel in 2013. After searching for a better venue, the Sunday River ski resort hotel, chosen in 2014, proved to be satisfactory with space to grow. The 2023 meeting was organized under a committee of volunteers led by President Jeffery Morrison who may be reached at nemineralpresident@gmail.com.

            The first day of this year’s meeting on Friday started with a group of short, less than 30 minutes each, talks on specific minerals from New England localities. The goal in future meetings is to continue with these short mineralogical presentations with a focus on New England and adjacent Canadian. In 2023 these short mineral talks covered the localities of Hurricane Mt., New Hampshire; Emmons pegmatite, Greenwood, Maine; Fletcher pegmatite, New Hampshire; and the Rynerson Hill pegmatite, Paris, Maine. The afternoon presentations finished with a one hour talk on critical elements mined from worldwide pegmatites by invited speaker, Philip Persson of Colorado. The critical minerals discussed focused mostly on lithium for batteries as extracted from spodumene which is a common mineral in some Maine pegmatites. Other critical minerals found in Maine include tantalum as found in tantalite and microlite, and cesium as found in pollucite. After a short break for banquet setup, attendees viewed the displays of New England minerals in the adjacent hall.   

The 2023  Annual Mineralogical Heritage Award banquet honored local field collector Cliff Trebilcock. Cliff was honored for his numerous collecting successes, especially in the Topsham Feldspar mining district. His most well-known discovery was of world class uraninite crystals from a pegmatite in the Topsham district. These specimens have set the standard for what the best crystals should look like.

Previous  Heritage  awardees have been the Perham family (Stanley, Hazel, Frank, and Jane), Terry Szenics, Raymond G. Woodman, and Irving "Dudy" and Mary Groves. Some of the best specimens of colored tourmaline, purple apatites, phosphate minerals, quartz crystals, and other rare pegmatite minerals are due to the efforts of these men and women.

Figure 1. Cliff Trebilcock (left) receiving the 2023 Mineralogical Heritage award from Don Dallaire. The award is a polished sphere of the Emmons pegmatite wall zone, Greenwood, Maine.

 Saturday had a series of morning and afternoon lectures. Don Dallaire spoke about the beryllium minerals of New Hampshire. Besides beryl, New Hampshire has produced attractive chrysoberyl, milarite, phenakite, helvite, and bertrandite. The best of these beryllium minerals were on display in the New Hampshire mineral cases organized by Don Dallaire. Jim Pecorra spoke about the discovery, mining, and reclamation of the Elizabeth Copper mine of Vermont. The Elizabeth Copper mine opened in 1809 and produced 8.5 million pounds of copper until the mine closed in 1957. Today, most of the area has been restored with some historic remains preserved in a park. Al Falster spoke on the geology and minerals of the Emmons mine, Maine. Falster, who has researched the Emmons pegmatite extensively, presented a specimen-illustrated talk on some of the rarer minerals such as lithiophilite, elbaite, and  rare element minerals such as pollucite, wodginite, cassiterite, and loellingite. Philip Persson spoke on the mineralogy and gems of the pegmatites in the Pikes Peak Batholith, Colorado. This highlighted the ever popular smoky quartz and amazonite as well as the rarer minerals such as cryolite, reibeckite, phenakite, fluocerite, and samarskite.

The day’s lectures were finished with Jeff Morrison reminiscing about mining and socializing with pegmatite miner Frank Perham, the son of Stanley Perham who mined feldspar starting in the 1920s and ran the Maine Mineral Store at Trap Corner, West Paris, beginning in 1919. Lots of free time during the day was spent visiting and buying minerals and books in the dealer’s rooms, participating in the silent mineral auction, and mingling with fellow collectors and miners.

The meetings are always followed by a one-day field trip on Sunday to nearby mines – usually a pegmatite with an opportunity to find beryl and colored tourmalines. The field trip locations offered are only revealed to attendees upon the start of the conference. This year the choices were the active Havey quarry, the Mt. Mica mine (an underground mine) with collecting allowed on the dump, and the Wheeler mica mine (quarry-tunnel numbers 1 and 2). There are many attendees who only come for the opportunity to collect. These field trips allow for collecting at famous quarries that are usually closed to all collecting. Many well-known collectors have taken advantage of this opportunity.

 

Figure 2. Fluorapatite, Waisanen Quarry, Greenwood, Maine. Mined by Frank Perham whose mined specimens were displayed in several cases to honor his memory. Perham, passed away in 2023.

 

 Figure 3. A selection of Havey mine discoveries (2013-2022) collected by Jeffrey Morrison and exhibited at the May 2023 conference..

 Figure 4. Amethyst group, Deer Hill, Stowe, Maine. Mined 1968. Cliff Trebilcock collection.

 

 Figure 4. Fred Wilda, the watercolor mineral artist, and his spouse Helen Rodak, collecting at the Havey Quarry, May 2013.

 

 Figure 5. Gary Howard (right), miner at Consolidated lower quarry (1890s Golding mine), Georgetown, Maine, May 2019. This pit produced colored tourmaline. The surrounding area during the field trip produced yellow and blue beryl, loellingite, eosphorite, and columbite.

 

 Figure 6. Joseph and his daughter, Krystalle Dorris (right side), owner-miners of the Smoky Hawk mine at Crystal Peak, Colorado, gazing at a pocket tourmaline recovered from the dump, Mt. Mica mine, Paris, May 2016.

  A conference attendee can also combine lectures, mineral purchases, and mineral collecting with a visit to the newly opened Maine Mineral and Gem Museum in Bethel. The museum is only seven miles from the conference resort. The Maine Mineral and Gem Museum is not only the premier mineral museum in Maine, it is also among the best regional museums for New England pegmatite minerals, standing as a well earned peer among the American Museum of Natural History (NYC), Harvard Museum (Cambridge), and Peabody Museum at Yale (New Haven). Although it does not contain the depth of historic specimens of these older museums, it has obtained via purchase and donation, the best suite of colored tourmalines from the famous gem mines of Mt. Mica, Dunton gem mine at Newry, Mt. Marie, Havey quarry, and Mt. Rubellite.

            The museum was created by the vision and efforts of Lawrence T. F. Stifler, Mary McFadden, and Robert Ritchie. Since the 1990s, they have worked, and guided the efforts to create this mineral and meteorite museum, and to distribute meteorites to other research institutions. The Bethel Museum also has possibly the best meteorite collection in the United States, maybe only exceeded by the American Museum of Natural History.

            The museum has also become a pegmatite research center with equipment and specimens that are available to researchers whether from other institutions or local. Circa 2010, the pegmatite research center at the University of New Orleans (MMP3), created by William Simmons, Karen Webber and Alexander Falster, moved to the museum.  With all these synergies the museum has continued to support research on Maine pegmatite minerals.

            The museum is now also the home and location for the annual pegmatite workshop, a five-day school open to public enrollment, that combines lectures on pegmatite formation and mineralogy, geared to miners, collectors and academics, with pegmatite quarry visits to observe and evaluate the lecture material.

 

Figure 7. During the Mineral Heritage Award banquet, May 2019, local collectors Bob and Pam Jackson discuss minerals with conference speaker, Bob Jones (far right) from Arizona.

.            The New England area has, since the 1990s, enjoyed a reactivation of mineral collecting, amateur prospecting and avocational mining (specimen mining by individuals as a hobby and not as their only source of income by selling specimens) in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont.  Frank Perham, who just this year passed away, for many decades mentored future miners and provided advice to many mineralogists, geologists, and collectors. The generation of miners who were influenced by Frank Perham – Gary Freeman, Jeffrey Morrison, Michael O’Neal, Ron Larrivee, Jonathan Spiegel, Gary Howard, Dennis Durgin, and Paul Pinette are now actively mining in numerous areas. Due to Perham’s influence many mineral displays at the conference exhibited specimens either found by Perham or mined with him. 

 

Figure 8. John Betts, New York City mineral dealer (left) and Dennis Durgin, owner-operator of the Mt. Marie mine, comment on the Maine topazes at 2017 conference.

 

Figure 9. A portion of the Fisher quarry exhibit by miner-collector Paul Pinette in May 2023. These specimens were mined after re-opening of the quarry circa 2012.

             The New England Mineral Conference activities -the lectures, banquet, dealer mineral rooms, and silent and voice auctions provide numerous opportunities to renew and create new friendships, learn of new mineral discoveries, and collect ideas for new areas to prospect for interesting minerals. The Maine Mineral and Gem Museum provides examples of the best specimens mined in Maine and the opportunity to learn about these deposits either in the pegmatite workshop or from books sold in the museum gift shop. With all these attractions, May is a great time to meet with avid mineral collectors and view, collect, and buy minerals.

Mark Ivan Jacobson is a well-know geologist/mineralogist with a strong interest in pegmatites. He obtained a BS in mineralogy-geochemistry from Pennsylvania State University in 1973 and a MS in sedimentary geology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1976. After graduate school, he worked for Amoco and Chevron in oil and gas development as an earth scientist, completing 35 years with Chevron before retiring in 2013.

He has published numerous articles on the geology, mineralogy, and mining-collecting histories of pegmatites since 1978 as well as two major books: Guidebook to the pegmatites of Western Australia (2007) and Antero Aquamarines: Minerals from the Mount Antero - White Mountain region, Chaffee County, Colorado (1993). In addition, he has written biographies of events and persons, including “The Denver Gem & Mineral Show: A Retrospective”, and a colorful biography of early female Colorado Pegmatite Geologist, Margaret B. Fuller Boos.