Ch. 2: Maine Pegmatites: Local Descriptions

Ch. 2: Maine Pegmatites: Local Descriptions Page of 170 Ch. 2: Maine Pegmatites: Local Descriptions Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
CUMBERLAND COUNTY.                                           61
amount of commercial feldspar of pottery grade still available at the locality.
The feldspar is excavated by hand drilling and blasting, and after hand sorting is hauled by wagons 3 miles to Littlefield station, where it is sold to the Maine Feldspar Company and ground at that com­pany's mill. Gem tourmalines and minerals of value as cabinet specimens are not encountered so frequently that it is profitable to work the deposit for them alone. In 1906 the quarry force con­sisted of three men. The gems and other valuable minerals obtained are marketed irregularly through local collectors, and no estimate of their value is obtainable. The feldspar output is a few hundred
tons a year.
CUMBERLAND COUNTY.
BRUNSWICK.
The relations between the granite and pegmatite in the town of Brunswick is well shown at the Woodside quarry, about 2\ miles southeast of Hillside station. This is an old quarry, where granite for flagging and underpinning has been obtained. The sheeting of the granite here is very perfect and nearly horizontal.
On the south wall of this quarry much pegmatite is associated with the granite. Many of the pegmatite masses of lenticular or ex­tremely irregular form grade into the granite in the most gradual and complete manner and are characterized by identical minerals. They differ from the granite only in texture, and there can be no question that the two rocks solidified practically contemporaneously from the same magma. Other pegmatite dikes, however, distinctly cut the granite with sharp contacts. The entire mincralogic similarity of this second type to the pegmatite which grades into the granite leads to the belief that the two types are genetically connected and that the intrusion of the pegmatite masses that show sharp boundaries fol­lowed quickly on the solidification of the granite which they cut.
Very similar relations were observed at the Grant quarry, about 1-1/2 miles east of Hillside and 3 miles west of Brunswick. This quarry has been described by Dale.0
The relations between the pegmatite and foliated rocks, which are probably of igneous origin, is well exhibited in Brunswick village at a quarry for road materials near the Lewiston branch of the Maine Central Railroad. The folia in the rocks are in many places very straight and regular for considerable distances. Much of the rock is a light-gray schist which has the mineral composition of a horn­blende granite.
The slide of this rock examined shows an interlocking granular texture in which most of the grains range from 0.15 to 0.60 milli-
<J Dale, T. N., The granites of Maine: Bull. U.S. Geol. Survey No. 313,1907, p. 76.
Ch. 2: Maine Pegmatites: Local Descriptions Page of 170 Ch. 2: Maine Pegmatites: Local Descriptions
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