Villa Rica Mine (Sulfur Mining & Railroad Company Pyrite Mine), Villa Rica, Douglas County, Georgia, USAi

Regional Level Types
Villa Rica Mine (Sulfur Mining & Railroad Company Pyrite Mine)	Mine
Villa Rica	Town
Douglas County	County
Georgia	State
USA	Country

The first prospecting at this place was done before the Civil War, for copper. About 1890, F. Durgy, of Colorado, bought the property, sank a 300-foot vertical shaft, and did considerable underground work. In 1895 he sold it to the Sulphur Mining & Railroad Company, a subsidiary of the Virginia-Carolina Chemical Company. The mine was opened in June, 1899, and worked almost continuously up to July, 1917. At that time underground work was discontinued, but other parties have since been engaged in reworking the tailings dump.

The deposits of the Villa Rica pyrite lead occur in a belt of Roan hornblende gneiss, along the northwestern border of a large mass of granite gneiss. The lead is at least 5 miles in length, extending from the Villa Rica mine to a point 2 or 3 miles west of Villa Rica. The deposits follow closely along the granite contact, so that some genetic connection with the latter may be inferred.

The granite belt is elongated northeast and southwest, and has a width of 2 miles or more, extending from a few hundred yards north of the station at Villa Rica to Mud Creek, a quarter of a mile south of the mine, where the creek flows approximately along the contact between the granite and the hornblende gneiss. The granite is fine to medium in grain, and distinctly gneissic, but becomes more massive toward the north. It is light gray in color, and consists of quartz, feldspars, hornblende, and muscovite, with little or no biotite. In the granite area are some small pegmatite veins and some bands or included masses of hornblende and hornblende-epidote gneiss. The banding of the gneiss strikes a little north of east, and dips to the southeast at high angles.

The hornblende gneiss, which forms a belt about a mile wide northwest of the granite area, is when fresh a dark-colored rock made up principally of hornblende, quartz, and feldspars. It weathers to a dark red, blocky, residual clay, like the "brick-bat" of the Georgia gold belts.

Although the pyrite vein occurs in .the hornblende belt, the immediate wall rock, some of which may be seen on the dump at the main shaft, is a garnetiferous gneiss, made up of quartz, feldspar, biotite, garnet, and a little pyrite. The garnets are clear, well crystallized, of light red color, but almost colorless in thin section, probably of grossularite variety. In the rock from the shaft they do not constitute more than a quarter of the volume, and the largest crystals are a quarter of an inch in diameter, but along the strike northeastward, probably beyond the limit of the workable pyrite vein, there is much float of garnet rock, with garnets as large as half an inch in diameter making up over half the bulk, while the matrix is principally finely crystalline quartz.

Parallel to the pyrite vein, but not apparently touching it, are a number of small pegmatite veins. Three of these are exposed in the railroad cut just west of the mill, and some fresh fragments were found on the dump. These veins are fine-grained pegmatite containing few crystals more than a quarter of an inch in diameter, and consisting entirely of quartz, feldspar and muscovite.

The average strike of the pyrite vein and associated rocks is N. 70° E., with a dip about 80° SE.

The main shaft is 500 feet deep, inclined 81 o, direction S. 32° E. The Durgy vertical shaft, 300 feet deep, which has been used for ventilation, is 125 feet east of the main shaft. The ore body has the form of a shoot pitching northeast. On the upper levels it extended 200 or 300 feet southwest of the main shaft, but in the lower levels all ore lies to the northeast of the shaft. On the 300- and 400-foot levels the ore has been worked to a distance of 700 feet northeast of the shaft, without reaching the end of the shoot. The thickness ranges from 4 to 25 feet, with a probable average of 10 feet. Most of the ore above the 400-foot level has been stoped out, but on the 500-foot level only a little drifting has been done.

Not much exploration work has been done, but there are several shafts which have cut probably workable deposits at other points along the lead. About a quarter of a mile northeast of the mine are three shafts, now caved in. It is said that 2 1/2 feet of good ore was encountered in one of these, and 6 feet in another. There is a two-compartment, timbered vertical shaft near the point where the lead crosses the public road, about 150 yards southwest of the mine, and another deep shaft at the top of the hill 100 yards farther southwest. It is said that some ore was taken from the latter.

Character of ore. - The ore minerals are pyrite and pyrrhotite. Pyrite is the dominant mineral, but pyrrhottite is abundant locally, especially near the footwall.

The principal gangue minerals are quartz, magnetite and garnet. Calcite, while not an important gangue mineral, is found in small veins, and lines cavities in the ore, sometimes occurring in crystals more than an inch long.

The more massive ore consists of pyrite with minor quantities of magnetite and pyrrhotite, which can not be separated by jigging, but this is rich enough in sulphur to burn as lump. In the lower grade ore the pyrite is finely intergrown with quartz and garnet, which makes clean separation impossible without very fine grinding.

Surface alteration. - The showing of weathered pyrite, or gossan, on the surface is not large, considering the size of the deposit. However, a few carloads of iron ore were shipped from a point near the mine. Of the associated rocks, the garnet rock made up largely of garnet and quartz is very resistant and is practically unweathered even in surface boulders. The hornblende gneiss weathers to porous, punky "brick-bat." The pegmatite dikes are completely kaolinized near the surface, while the biotite gneiss weathers to a ferruginous clay. The following section is exposed in the railroad cut just west of the mill. The formations are numbered from north to south, and the measurements are horizontal distances, almost at right angles to the steep dip.