How Did You Collect Your First Mineral?

When I was about 17, my family was visiting friends in Southbury, Connecticut. They took us to Greene's farm, so my first mineral collected was almandine. Then to Mine Hill in Roxbury Station where we collected siderite, sphalerite, and pyrite. Recently circumstances require down-sizing and I had to sell all but about two dozen of my mineral specimens. One that I kept is one of those first garnets . . . a perfect dodecahedron, modified by the trapezohedron. In later years, I spent a lot of time at the Strickland Quarry in Portland, Connecticut and then the Thomaston Dam railroad cut was practically in my back yard. In short, I was hooked.

I have always been looking at the ground. My parents took the attached picture of me filling my pockets with rocks when I was 4 at Letchworth State Park. In Weblos (Boy Scouts) we visited Ward's Natural Science Establishment. I learned about a local rock show and bought a $5 calcite and fluorite from John Medici. That was a lot of money when I was only getting 0.25 per week allowance (still have specimen). Decided I better learn something about that specimen and started checking out books from my school library. Started attending Rochester Mineral Symposium when I was 13. Grandparents lived in Herkimer, NY so I collected there and my dad (an accountant with no interest in minerals) would take me on collecting trips to the Adirondacks and Canada. Went to South Dakota School of Mines and got my BS and MS in geology and studied with Bill Roberts. Worked for the Museum of Geology curating the mineral collection. Meet my wife there (also a collector). Now live in Omaha, Nebraska and work in environmental but field collect and attend shows when I can.

I started collecting when I was 8 or 9 years old. I got a mineral book from the library and was hooked for life. I lived in central Massachusetts where there were sand deposits formed by the melting glaciers. There were rounded stone of quartz and feldspar that i picked up.

Great topic.

My first field collecting experience was at the Upper New Street quarry in Paterson, NJ. It was 1997, I had just graduated college and had been purchasing NJ specimens for about a year. My brother in law told me some specimens could still be found at Upper New Street and gave me directions on how to get there. I was there for about an hour.......and was able to dislodge a large pillow basalt boulder from the far wall.....which exposed a spectacular Prehnite pocket with huge (1 1/4 inch +) Analcime crystals. I remember showing the specimens to my father & brother in law....and they were just stunned by my beginner's luck. To this day, the best specimen from that pocket is in my collection and holds it own with the museum specimens on the same shelf.

Needless to say........I was deeply hooked ever since and have always been immensely appreciative to be able to field collect minerals at so many great locales within NJ.

Regards,

Eric Stanchich

I grew up in Queens, in New York City. The shore along the East River and other areas was protected by huge chunks of rock that had been removed from excavations, probably in Manhattan My father, who had taken one course in geology, would point out the Fordham gneiss and mica schist. I was probably eight. Somewhere along the line, I got the idea to knock off a sample with a hammer. A friend of my father was an earth science teacher and he helped me to identify my samples. I remember thinking that something was marble, but he told me that it was feldspar.

When I was a child ( in the early 1960's ) my family lived in Colombia, South America. My father was a medical missionary and rotated chaplaincy duty serving the Americans and Canadians working on a hydroelectric project high in the Andes Mountains. While traveling up to the site we passed a number of small gold mining operations that had their ore piles ( gold-rich pyrite ) stamp mills and shaker tables set up very close to the roadway. We often stopped and checked out the piles for crystals and they obliged us. I found quartz in needle like crystals, calcite and pyrite. These intrigued me enough to inquire of my Dad what they were and to my surprise he remembered his college geology and was able to give me the identities. This peaked my interest to start reading and learning about minerals when we came back to the U.S.A. . It also helped that in middle school my homeroom teacher was Mr. Bill Welsh ( welshite ) who for many years became my hands-on mentor. I still have one specimen of calcite with pyrite, but alas it is starting to succumb to the pyrite disease.

As a child growing up in Kimberley BC, we lived about a block from the old dormant mine dump at the head of the old Townsite Road. Much to the dismay of my mother, my brother and I used to go down there regularly. We used to climb down a few meters and dig into the hill. As I recall, it was mostly iron stained rock with a few flashes of what I now know is pyrite. We also found the odd bit of garnet. To find the lead ore we had to go right to the bottom and pick along the CPR spur line to old rock house. Hounding usually came to a quick end once we found the huckleberry patches along the tracks. The rails have been torn out and replaced by new tracks for the Bavarian City Mining Railway and the waste dumps blended into the hill, buried and planted. You'd never realise they were even there. Only the huckleberries remain. I still have some of those old garnets and a bit of the pyrite, too
Gord

at the age of 6 collected agate pebbles on the beach at Dunure, Ayrshire whilst camping with my father

When I was about 7 yrs. old I was exploring a construction site near our home in Livingston,NJ where there was crushed trap rock in the driveway. I found a small quartz crystal attached to a piece of traprock.

My uncle gave me a sample of ray mine oar (he worked there) and I found fossils in Pennsylvania when I was between 4 and 6. My family moved to CT and I was presented with pretty white quartz and shiny mica. In 2nd grade I picked through sand for garnets during recess and become obsessed with finding new minerals. And now I have a basement filled with thousands of rocks.

-Rowan Lytle

son: -picks up huge loose amethyst cluster- "Is this what we're looking for?"
father: "Holy #$@%!

35 yrs ago when I was 8, I saw some holes in a cliff face whilst out on a foraging hunt with my parents. As any normal kid, I pestered my dad to take me in them (mum was 'no way!'). We went into the mines and I scrabbled about up and down tiny tunnels and climbs and filled my pockets with shiney stuff. When dad and me came out, we washed my finds in the river, it was nail head calcite and a peice the size of my dads thumb - somewhere, I still have it. Later, whilst still foraging, I was wading the river and found fresh water mussels, being 8, I wanted to open and eat them, so secretly I opened one, and there was a creamy/white thing - a pearl. That evening we had fresh water mussles and I had 3 fresh water pearls and some nail head calcite. My first ever finds. When I was 10, just before my grandfather died, he gave me a small peice of what I think is amythest or florite - it is very very deep purple, a rock and mineral book and his geological hammer, he studied first geology at university. Both my father and grandfather were into cave and mine exploration - so... I guess, I have the genes and the love for it from them, much to my mothers annoyance as everytime I go visit, they get more samples !!

Claire

About 30 years ago we were invited to a couples house to play Euchre. The Hostess asked me to come with her to meet her two neighbors . The two women had to be in their 70's. They were in the basement, piles of rocks in about every place imaginable.
I did not have a clue what they were doing. I was absolutely fascinated by them. True Rockhounds. I stayed there for over 2 hrs
By the time I left they had given me a huge amethest they had mined themselves. The hostess that had taken me there was really mad. She had tried for years to get a specimen from them and could not do it.

The two women could tell I thought this was the greatest thing I had ever seen. I had picked up rocks all my life as I was walking.
It was a joke where I worked that if my purse was emptied out there would of course be something I had picked up.

That Amethest was my favorite possesion. But I did not start collecting until many years after my Husband passed away.
Then one day I picked up that piece of amethest and realized that this is what I had always wanted to do.

Trust me, I have made up for lost time. After he had passed away I thought I would never have anything again I really wanted to do.

Collecting has given me a new lease on life. I am totaly addicted.

"How did you collect your first mineral". Illegally!!!! I was seven and brought home quartz with pyrite from Yosemite. Still have that rock. The curiosity resulted in a Bachelor of Science in Geology.

Linda Smith
Rock Mama and Boogie Boarding Grandma

Picked it up off the ground !!

Cheers

I guess I'm the "odd person out". My story begins, not as a child or as a teen, but as a "senior citizen" wandering the streets of Kathmandu looking for a colourful "stone" from Nepal for my wife who asked for this to decorate our living room. In my search I started noticing beautiful crystals in stores. I talked with store owners about :where they came from, who found them, how did they find them etc. etc. I wanted details, they just wanted a sale ( and me to get the hell out so they could serve other customers).
I returned to Ottawa and started reading, which WAS my usually method of pedagogy.I ended up on my first self-guided field trip, Ann Sabina's book in hand, and, much to my amazement, found this monster

My wife said: "somebody has cut this".... I relied, "No, it grew like this in the ground!".... And collecting thereafter became my new passion...so I've got a lot of ground to cover to catch up to most of you:))...literally speaking

I was a fossil boy in 1960 collecting gravel pits at the Burrough's Adding Machine Company's summer resort in southern Michigan.

On a rare day you could find a Petosky Stone. I believed that dinosaurs still existed, but they were not observed because they were only the size of chickens..

During a walk back to our summer trailer home along the road out from the gravel pit, I spotted a perfect red and white Lake Superior agate about the size of a walnut. I didn't know what it was, but it surely was something interesting and pretty. It's in my house somewhere, but I can't find it.

I didn't really start collecting minerals until 7th grade Earth Science class at Wylie Groves High School in Birmingham, Michigan. Most schools don't teach earth science.

It was in that class where I learned that I could identify minerals, and the guy sitting next to me was Richard Chapoton, and he started showing me mineral specimens that he bought bought at our local mineral store. Topaz crystals for five cents. I always had at least five cents so that's when I started buying minerals. And then I started working as mineral trimmer at Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Can you imagine a mineral store in every comunity ? Seattle once had more than 20 mineral and lapidary shops. Now there are none.

Not long after I started buying 5 cent mineral specimens, my dad took me to Clay Center before you'd be arrested for a Sunday visit, and my mom took me the Maybee, Michigan limestone quarry for celestite and sulfur. I had no idea how lucky I was.

If you are ever in the Detroit area, make sure you visit Cranbrook's mineral museum. I committed every mineral in every case to memory. They have a fabulous case of copper country calcites and a spectacular crystallized gold from California that must weigh more than 12 pounds. Just before my family moved to Seattle, Cranbrook put together a case which was a reconstructed Pike's Peak amazonite / smoky quartz pocket with a topaz here and there. That was before hot melt glue existed.

Bart.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/08/2012 08:47PM by Bart Cannon.

I have 2 distinct early rembrances of my early mineral activities. My first was when I went to summer camp in the Catskill Mountains of NY State. I would pick up small calcite cleavages from the gravel roads around the camp. This is a very common way for many kids to start an interest in minerals. My second circumstance is more unique. I was a junior high student in NYC, about 14 years old. I had a fish tank with some guppies and a friend came over to play one day. He had been interested in minerals and when he looked into my tank he saw a rock that had to have! He said "that is pale green prehnite from New Jersey and I will give you $5.00 for it". I sold it to him. For the next several years we conspired to have one of our fathers drive us to the NJ mining area, but it never happened. Some of you might recognize his name................Jonathan Marks..............the defense attorney for Mark David Chapman...................the fellow who killed John Lennon in NYC about 1980. CHEERS..................BOB

I left Britain in 1967 and travelled to Norway to find a job, I was married to a Norwegian woman at the time, and the first job I was offered was in a quarry, the rock at this quarry was an olivine gabbro, and the first mineral that I found there was a small quartz crystal, the second one was one of the scapolites, so I bought Dana's book of Mineralogy so that I could find out what they were, and the rest is history and 12,374 specimens in my collection.

Spencer.

Ich wohne in einer der mineralreichsten Regionen Deutschlands,dem Fichtelgebirge in Bayern.
Und doch kam ich zum Sammeln von Mineralien und Fossilien erst auf Umwegen über Griechenland.
Auf Kreta verbrachte ich mit meiner Frau einen Urlaub.Während einer Wanderung in küstennahen
Berge durchquerten wir einen alten Steinbruch.Unter den vielen Steinen,die dort so herumlagen,befand sich
auch eine kleine Calcit-Stufe.Der Anblick der xx hat mich so fasziniert,dass ich unbedingt mehr über
"Steine" wissen wollte.Es war der Beginn einer tollen Sammlerkarriere.
Nächstes Jahr im Mai jährt sich dieser Urlaub zum zwanzigstensmal.
Vielleicht geht es wieder nach Kreta.

Norbert

I remember as a young child of about 5 that if you found a certain semi-transparent white pebble on the beach at The Nobbies (on Phillip Island, Victoria, Australia) and smashed them open, they would break into shiny, translucent rhombs. I later learnt they were pebbles of calcite but they were magical to me back then.
Combined with an amazingly supportive mum who took me on field trips all over Victoria to collect, my love of minerals was born.