Get off the Beaver Meadow Road exit 8 from Rt 9 in Haddam and head NE on Beaver Meadow Road. At the 5-way intersection at Arnolds, turn hard right to go south on Turkey Hill Road. Follow to first right and turn onto Filley Road. Park to the left of the large red barn just up the road on your left. Path to the quarry is straight ahead in the woods, it may be overgrown but opens up once you are past the edge of the woods. Follow this nice straight path about 500 feet to the second large pegmatite on your right. The digging area will be obvious.
The coarse-grained pegmatite vein along the bottom and then up the left side of the outcrop yields good yellow, green, and blue beryl, columbite, and almandine. Micro uraninites are also a possibility. The beryl quality varies from rotten to very gemmy and good ones are tough to find these days. Sift the dumps for fragments to cut into gems or work the narrow vein for crystals. Lots of big mica sheets, too. Collecting is by STATE PERMIT ONLY. Hand tools only!!!!!
As far as I can tell, there is nothing in the mineralogical literature about this little prospect, so here is information garnered from recent experiences and interviews with past collectors:
!934 aerial photo.
History of Quarrying and Collecting at the CCC Camp Area
1. Minerals in the quarry SW of the former CCC camp are the basic pegmatite minerals microcline, albite, quartz, muscovite, and schorl. The schorl crystals are typically very crumbly. Large partial crystals can be seen in the SW corner of the cut. Some terminated schorl crystals and psuedo-hexagonal muscovite crystals have been the best finds, but much of the limited dumps are unexplored. A football-sized microcline crystal turned up in the spring 2008.
2. The old beryl trench was not very productive.
3. The prospect occurs in a narrow, 2 to 4-foot-wide, very-coarse-grained pegmatite dike that cross-cuts the barren, fine-grained pegmatite that makes up most of the outcrop. Besides the usual pegmatite minerals named above, which can measure 2 feet across, beryl is the most common accessory. Crystals range in quality from very corroded and opaque to gem grade and in color from nearly colorless, through pale green and yellow to deep golden honey. Other minerals include well-formed garnet (almandine-spessartine) crystals, columbite-tantalites, micro-sized uraninites, and massive pale green fluorapatite.
4. The rock surrounding the pegmatites is gray schist. Half-inch-sized almandine garnets of decent crystal quality have been found in outcrops here.
The history of quarrying & collecting near the Civilian Conservation Corps’ Camp Filley (Project S-64, Company #1201, Cockaponset S. F.) barracks are largely undocumented. According to Williams (circa 1945), "Near the C.C.C. Camp in Beaver Meadow, large crystals of Columbite occur with Yellow Beryl and Muscovite crystals in a pegmatite dyke. Biotite in large masses at the Feldspar quarry close to the C.C.C. Camp." He also apparently wrote about the prospect in 1899, which is well before the CCC camp existed, but the general description of the location and the minerals fits: "Two miles South of the Court House near the Turkeyhill road Golden Beryl and Columbite are found in fine crystals." Other than these brief descriptions, tte information presented here comes from interpreting aerial photos and summarizing the observations and experiences of collectors in the last 40 years. Collecting is allowed now by date-specific DEP permit only.
The pegmatite quarry situated SW of the barracks appears abandoned and slightly overgrown (gray-toned) on the earliest available (1934) aerial photographs, when the camp was present. So it doesn’t appear to have been quarried by the CCC, otherwise the ground would appear bare (white). It may have been an old feldspar or mica quarry. Its size and shape is the same now as then so nothing significant appears to have happened there since. The absence of large dumps suggests they were used as fill somewhere. I found a bottle called “Granite Rock Spring, Higganum, Conn.” on top of a small dump in the quarry. This soft drink was from a company active during the CCC days. A soil borrow pit with no exposed rock is located along Turkey Hill Road.
The history of the prospect is also undocumented, it does not appear on the 1934 aerials. According to Russ Behnke, the prospect was explored before WWII for mica and beryl. Evidently, not too much was found, as it is a rather small working and could have been expanded had more interesting minerals been found. It was one of Walter Behnke's (Russ’ father) favorite places to go. He sifted the entire dump for cutting rough beryl in the early 1970s. Pockets were rarely found. Russ has seen two crude smoky quartz crystals and two columbites that grew in pockets. Otherwise, the minerals of interest were embedded in the pegmatite. Garnets were found in the pit and in boulders 10 or 20 yards south of the prospect. Some of these were in sharp crystals over 1-inch across. Jeff Fast collected terminated columbite from there; one radiating spray of crystals is about 2 inches long. They are very fragile, typically with a mica coating and occur near yellow beryl, which is mostly what the locality is noted for. Tabular, subhedral crystals have been found loose in the dump, and in soil under the dump.
Pale yellow and green beryl crystals are typically embedded in the pegmatite. Crystals are up to 1 to 2 inches in diameter and 6 or 7 inches long, although at one point there were multiple yellow beryl crystals there that were measured in feet! They crumbled all apart when you tried to collect them. Jeff Fast and Joel Sweet also found some nice gemmy yellow beryl in the mica schist at the contact with the pegmatite. Gem stones up to 5 carats have been cut. Jeff has a medium yellow, 2.94 carat eye-clean trilliant and Russ has one faceted stone of the deepest yellow that is slightly over 1 carat. The pegmatite extends to the south, and beryls have been dug from this area, which shows promise for further exploration. Recent digging along the coarse-grained dike continues to turn up good crystals.
The old beryl trench near the trailhead was prospected by Russ in the 1970s. Sadly, not much turned up.
Fairly decent almandine garnets have been found in local Collins Hill Formation schist outcrops.
Interesting ruins of the CCC camp, and perhaps from other by-gone days, abound, including two chimneys
References:
Williams, Horace S. (1899): Letter to Miss
Eveline Brainerd of Haddam, February 18, 1899. Brainerd Public Library,
Haddam, Connecticut.
Williams, Horace S. (circa 1945): Article for New York Society of
Mineralogists. Brainerd Public Library, Haddam, Connecticut.
Two sides of a 2-inch columbite-(Fe) from CCC quarry found by Jim DeCosta in soil under boulders.
More specimen photos at www.mindat.org/loc-193458.html