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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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