Mercer County Workhouse Quarry, Moore, Hopewell Township, Mercer County, New Jersey, USAi

Regional Level Types
Mercer County Workhouse Quarry	Quarry
Moore	- not defined -
Hopewell Township	Township
Mercer County	County
New Jersey	State
USA	Country

An old locality and former prison quarry in traprock (diabase)located at Moore, near Lambertville.

[note: The Mineral Industry of New Jersey publication refers to Mercer County Work House Quarry].

The Mercer County Workhouse Quarry is a small, hillside quarry, roughly triangular shaped and approximately 500 by 800 feet. It is located 2.6 airline miles south – southwest of the center of Lambertville, NJ (Bridge Street) adjacent to the east side of Route 29 and less than 500 feet from the east shore of the Delaware River. From the early years of the 20th century until the 1970’s the quarry was worked adjunct to the Mercer County prison. The crushers and screening plant ran for the last time in 1975 when several thousand tons of rock, gleaned from the old pit, were processed into subbase material for the county road department.

The quarry is excavated in a small diabase body known as Belle Mountain. This is the outcrop of the eastern end of a larger body that continues under the Delaware and outcrops in Pennsylvania as Bowman’s Hill. Bowman’s Hill is a local landmark because it rises abruptly above the river valley and has a stone tower on its summit. The Belle Mountain/Bowman’s Hill diabase outcrops just north of, and near the western end of, a slightly arcuate trend of discontinuous diabase intrusive bodies that extends from the vicinity of the Hopewell Barite Mine to Jericho Mountain, south-southwest of Bowman’s Hill in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. These bodies look like stocks in map view but are interpreted as north dipping, finger-like projections from a continuous sill or sheet down dip. They are the southwestern most extensions of the Palisades intrusive complex.

The Belle Mountain/Bowman’s Hill diabase was once thought to be a feeder dike because of sharply crosscutting contacts with the adjacent sediments. The more recent interpretation is that it is a down dip fragment of the linear group of isolated intrusions just to the south that has been caught up in the Hopewell Fault. The Belle Mountain/Bowman’s Hill diabase is less fractionated (Husch and Hozik, 1988) than the nearby diabase at either Baldpate Mountain (Husch, et. al, 1988) or Jericho Mountain. The chemistry of Belle Mountain is more like the Lambertville Sill a short distance to the north.

Other Regions, Features and Areas containing this locality

References