Morgan Mine (Arnold Prospect), Oglethorpe Co., Georgia, USAi

Regional Level Types
Morgan Mine (Arnold Prospect)	Mine
Oglethorpe Co.	County
Georgia	State
USA	Country

The Morgan mine is situated about two miles northeast of the Guarantee mine and six and a half miles southeast of Lexington, the county seat of Oglethorpe county. Much more extensive gold mining operations have been carried on here than at any other locality in the county. Mr. John Wynn, the original owner of the property, erected a stamp mill and prosecuted work at this mine on an auriferous quartz vein before the Civil war. Later, the mine was worked at intervals by several different managements. including the Morgan Mining Company, the Lexington Gold Mining Company, and others. At time of visit, the property was under the control of Mr. W. E. Shem, of Alliance, Ohio.

The principal mining operations at the Morgan mine have been conducted on an auriferous quartz vein having a general strike of N. 12° E. and a nearly vertical dip. The two more important shafts are about four hundred feet apart and are designated respectively as the South, or Water shaft, and, the North shaft. Mining operations in recent years have been carried on entirely from the South shaft. Approximately a hundred yards of open cut work has been done on the vein between the two shafts. At time of visit the South shaft had a depth of something over a hundred feet. An old drift at a sixty-foot level extends from this shaft northeastward along the strike of the vein for about a hundred and seventy-five feet and has a southwestward extension of about forty feet. A drift has also been run for a considerable distance northeastward from the bottom of the shaft. As exposed in the South shaft the vein will average something like four feet in thickness and in the upper portion of the shaft is composed principally of solid quartz, but in the lower portion contains considerable interlaminated wall rock. As seen in the level at the bottom of the shaft, the vein exhibited a number of breaks and irregularities in thickness and in this particular drift as far as the vein had been exposed the prospects of a probable extensive supply of ore were not very encouraging.

The chief sulphides of the vein are pyrite and chalcopyrite, and a little below water level, native copper in small masses is occasionally found in seams and cracks in the vein quartz. The wall rock at this mine is a highly sheared and altered igneous rock which in thin section shows a structure and mineral composition suggestive of a grano-diorite. Phenocrysts both of quartz and feldspar badly crushed up, and in the case of the latter mineral, largely altered to sericite or kaolin, are present in a fine grained ground-mass composed of quartz and feldspar and sericite and considerable amounts of chlorite probably derived from biotite. Much of the quartz and feldspar of the ground-mass, and to a less extent in the case of that of the phenocrysts, exhibit a granophyre structure. Considerable amounts of secondary calcite are present. The analysis of this rock shows a chemical composition corresponding more nearly to a grano-diorite than a true granite.

As previously stated, no mining operations had been in progress, up to the time of visit, at the North shaft for a number of years. It is stated to have an approximate depth of eighty-six feet with a drift at a fifty-foot level that has been run for a distance of sixty feet southwest of the strike of the vein and a hundred feet on the northeast extension of the vein.