Latitude: 41°3'20"N
Longitude: 74°41'0"W
A quarry in a disjunct block of the Precambrian Franklin Marble. The outcrop area is pictured on USGS map GQ-1707. It is lens shaped with dimensions of approximately 1.35 mile long, 0.22 miles wide and an estimated depth, in the area of the quarry, from the surface to an underlying thrust fault of approximately 750 feet. The quarry excavation is approximately 3000 X 1500 X 300 feet.
Started about 1906 by Thomas Alva Edison to provide lime for his Portland cement business. Later owned for many years by the Limestone Products Corp. using the Limecrest trade name. Several short-term owners have operated this property in recent years.
The marble (limestone) portion of the quarry closed by increasing production costs, including pumping water up from an increasingly deep pit. Understanding is that the final operator, Oldcastle, a huge, multinational construction materials company based in Ireland, bought the Limecrest quarry in order to close it. They removed a competitor to other Oldcastle operations that are large, lower cost and produce similar products but are more distant from the Northeastern US market. Now these more distant operations can assume the market that Limecrest once served. In short, Limecrest fell victim to the trend of concentrating production in fewer but larger operations that make a standardized product line. The quarry was allowed to flood to a prescribed level as road aggregate quarrying in the overlying microcline gneiss continues to produce construction aggregate .
The marble exposed in the Limecrest Quarry is similar, in every regard, to the Franklin marble of the main outcrop belt. It contains the same assemblage(s) of skarn minerals and also epigenetic mineral assemblages in veins. The epigenetic assemblages are Mississippi Valley Type (MVT) lead-zinc and ferroaxinite-bearing alpine cleft.
Mineral List
43 entries listed. 37 valid minerals.
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References
- A Quest for New Jersey Minerals, Robert Speiser (1978): 9 (privately published).
- Jaszczak, John A. (1997), Unusual graphite crystals from the Lime Crest quarry, Sparta, New Jersey: Rocks & Minerals: 72(5): 330-334.
- Jaszczak, John A. (1998), Unusual graphite crystals from the Lime Crest quarry, Sparta, New Jersey: The Picking Table: 39(1): 20-24.
- USGS map GQ-1707.
- Information Letter re: Minerals, published by the Limestone Products Corp.
- Volkert, Richard A. (2010): Deep Drilling at Limecrest Quarry, Sparta, New Jersey. The Picking Table, Volume 51, No. 1, p. 10-13.
- Wolf*, A., Rakovan, J. and Cahill, C. (2003) Ferroaxinite From Lime Crest Quarry, Sparta, New Jersey. Rocks and Minerals. 78, 252-256.
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