Ballard Green Quartz Occurrence, Owings Mills, Baltimore County, Maryland, USAi

Regional Level Types
Ballard Green Quartz Occurrence	Dome (Lost)
Owings Mills	Census-designated Place
Baltimore County	County
Maryland	State
USA	Country

During housing construction beginning in the spring and summer of 2014 "tens of thousands of quartz crystal specimens" where found.
"In the early spring of 2014, the removal of trees from the site uncovered huge quartz boulders bearing numerous milky quartz crystals. By late spring, construction crews had removed enough earth to level the entire area, piling the dirt into a mound about 30 yards long, 8 yards wide, and 5 yards high. From these mounds, collectors uncovered plates of quartz bearing multiple crystals measuring to well over an inch. Most of these crystals were milky, some of them clear. Encrustations of dried clay were present on many of the specimens. A different mode of collecting began to evolve around the Fourth of July.

Richard Hoff was there the day that Jim Hooper, President of the Baltimore Mineral Society, wandered a few yards south from the dirt mound and found a single doubly-terminated quartz crystal measuring about an inch and a half. It was embedded in a two foot embankment where a road would later be cut. Almost immediately, Hoff and the other collectors who were present began digging a short distance from the embankment and eventually found more crystals. They dubbed the hole that produced them as “the Hooper pocket.”

- From the Mineral Bliss article "A Major Quartz Crystal Find in Baltimore County, Maryland", used with permission from Jake Slagle. Please see link for the full Mineral Bliss article by Jake Slagle.
http://mineralbliss.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-major-quartz-crystal-find-in.html
The site is now covered with a housing development and is private property.

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