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Below
the Surface:
Or
What the Heck Is Vermiculite?
Any
fourth-grader in the Old Dominion learns about
Virginia’s coalfields, but how many of you know
that the Commonwealth is the only state in the U.S.
to mine kyanite; and one of only two states that
produces titanium, zircon and vermiculite?
The
Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy
reports the state produces over 30 mineral resources
from coal and oil to gold, crushed stone and more
exotic substances buried beneath our
landscape.
There
even may have been some diamond sightings. In 1855,
a man grading a street in Manchester, VA, which is
now a part of Richmond, found what was, at the time,
the largest diamond in the U.S. According to Richard
Dietrich in Geology and Virginia, published by the
Virginia Division of Mineral Resources in 1970, the
diamond weighed 23.75 carats in the rough and a
little over 11.5 carats when it was cut. Dietrich
reported other diamond finds, including one found in
1847 in Orange County and another in Tazewell County
in 1913.
But
there are skeptics. “A diamond may have fallen
from some traveller’s pocket in Manchester, rather
than derived from local geology,” writes George
Mason geography professor Charles Grymes.
Virginia’s geology is unlikely to produce
diamonds, he believes, except in some areas west of
Danville. “There’s probably a fascinating story
behind the people who claimed to have found each
diamond … and what might have happened before the
diamonds were ‘found,’” he adds.
So,
what exactly is found in Virginia? It depends on
where you look. The Old Dominion’s five
physiographic areas each yield different mineral
wealth. From sand, gravel and clay found in the
Coastal Plain region to the coalfields, natural gas,
methane and some oil and crushed stone in the
southwestern Appalachian Plateau region, the
minerals industry in the Commonwealth is a $2
billion business. As mentioned, Virginia is the only
producer in the U.S. of kyanite, a heat-resistant
material used in tiles and bricks, and the number
two producer of vermiculite found in insulation and
potting soil.
Coal
is perhaps what the Old Dominion is best known for,
but the Appalachian coalfields in the southwestern
corner of the state were not developed until the
1880s when railroads made it easier to ship the
mineral from the isolated area. Coal was so abundant
that geographer Grymes reports miners would debate
whether they preferred “tall coal,” which
required reaching above their heads or “short”
coal that meant back-breaking crouching. The fuel
mineral has been a controversial boom or bust
resource for that region. The Clean Air Act in the
1980s affected demand because of requirements for
low-sulfur coal. Also, over time, easy-to-mine coal
beds became exhausted requiring more sophisticated
methods for extracting the mineral.
Mining
has a long history in the Commonwealth. While early
Jamestown settlers may have searched for gold, they
settled on iron as the colony’s mineral wealth.
Grymes points out that Virginia place names such as
Catherine Furnace and Clifton Forge reflect that
heritage. The iron-processing industry declined in
the early 1800s when Pennsylvania developed more
efficient furnaces using coal, not readily
accessible in Virginia for another eight decades.
Still, the only Confederate producer of iron during
the Civil War, Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond,
produced the armor for the iron-clad, Merrimac,
which faced off against its Union counterpart, the
Monitor, in the waters off Hampton Roads in 1862.
Other
mineral resources also played a key role in the
Civil War, writes geologist Robert Whisonant. Iron,
lead, salt and niter (saltpeter) were essential to
both the Union and Confederate armies. Iron was
needed for utensils, arms and railroads; lead for
bullets; salt to preserve food and niter to make
gunpowder. There were several attempts to capture
lead mines in Wythe County in southwestern Virginia
until December 1864 when Wytheville and the nearby
mines were partly burned by Union soldiers. The
mines were completely destroyed four months later.
In the last years of the war, the Wythe mines were
the sole source of bullets for Confederate soldiers.
Today,
Virginia’s mineral industry ranks 22nd among the
50 states, reports the VDMME, and non-fuel mineral
production accounts for more than 1.5 percent of the
U.S. total. Still, a diamond mine would be
nice.
NEXT:
Don’t Wash a Mule on the Sidewalk: Odd Laws,
Obsolete Ordinances
--
June 20, 2005
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