Green's Farm locality (Roxbury garnet mine; Roxbury Falls garnet mine; Garnet Hill), Roxbury, Litchfield County, Connecticut, USAi

Regional Level Types
Green's Farm locality (Roxbury garnet mine; Roxbury Falls garnet mine; Garnet Hill)	Quarry (Abandoned)
Roxbury	Town
Litchfield County	County
Connecticut	State
USA	Country

There are three mines, all owned by different companies, a mile or more apart, and all deserted now. The last one was worked in 1901 and 1902 by the Armour Company of Chicago, but was abandoned before much work had been done.

The garnets were separated from the white, shiny, talcose schist by being ground and run over shakers, leaving the garnets whole or nearly so, to be put in bags to be shipped to be ground for garnet paper, and other abrasive purposes.

As the mines and buildings were closed and deserted, I could get very little information, but the garnets were used for the different grades of garnet paper, and owing to the lack of water for the boilers, and also for separating the materials, the mines were abandoned.

Another version was that Carborundum could be made cheaper and used to better advantage.

The largest mine—as it is called—though it looks like three great reservoirs, one below the other, are great pits or open quarries, about 400 feet in diameter and 50 feet deep, with garnets in sight everywhere in great quantities, like raisins in a pudding, but like the pudding, not many in a small piece, unless you are lucky. The other two mines have only one small opening apiece.

The size of the garnets run very near the same size, not many an inch in diameter, and rarely one is found two inches, but most of them are half an inch, and as they become exposed to the atmosphere, become rusty and dull.

Then again there are more black...found than any other color and very few show color. When the mines were working and they opened a new vein, some very perfect ones were secured, though most of them were bruised by the blasting.

It is a hard job to find a nice group in a schist matrix that can be developed sufficiently to grace the collector's cabinet, and the larger ones are most always found in single crystals.

The miners say that there was an offer of a thousand dollars for a perfect garnet, and I can safely say that I never heard of any one that was able to claim it.

I will not try to describe them, as all collectors are familiar with the garnets of this locality, but will say that their form is a dodecahedron, and a few have their edges truncated, but no complex crystals have been reported.

The ledges and rocks in the vicinity, especially where they are weathered or uncovered, are coated with crystals of staurolite, and some very perfect, though not large ones, are found, but they are seldom over an inch long.

[In the 1880s] A mill was constructed at Roxbury Falls. In Roxbury, another mill was built, about 1890, by the Armour Company. When the railroad was completed through Roxbury in 1867, the little rural farming town awakened. Opportunity came with the railroad and it became economically feasable [sic] to transport heavy loads to the New York and southern Connecticut markets. A burst of mining and quarrying activity occured [sic], with the reopening of the iron deposits at Mine Hill, Roxbury, and the quarrying of building stone near the iron mine.

The garnet production was accomplished by a milling process. The rocks were crushed and sorted by gravity to separate the garnets from the much lighter schist matrix. Then, using differing grades of screens, the garnets were sorted to grit sizes for industrial applications....The soft mica matrix was soon quarried out and a harder quartz based matrix was encountered. This made it more difficult to separate the garnets from the matrix. Operations came to a halt before 1900 when discoveries in Massachusetts, Vermont and Canada were made. The Canadian deposit was more concentrated and had a softer matrix. The milling equipment from the Roxbury Falls operation was dissassembled [sic] and transported to Canada.

The land which had been cleared for mining operations was now suitable for a more traditional Connecticut industry, dairy farming. As seen during a visit in the 1950's, the farm was a producing operation, run by Mr. Green for whom the garnet deposit is now named. At that time it was necessary to be careful in harvesting loose garnets on the surface because some apparent "garnets" were dropped by Mr. Green's sheep! The farm is no longer in operation; it closed with the passing of Mr. Green in the late 1970's. The current owner of the land at the end of Perkin's Road allows collectors to park their cars on her property for a $1.00 fee per car. The town of Roxbury has the rights to excavate the mine dumps for use as road fill. Some roadbeds, especially the dirt roads near Judd's Bridge in northern Roxbury, were constructed with this material and show fine garnets loose in the soil at the roadside. Passing cars pop them out of the matrix and clean them, but seldom crush them.