We feel very privileged that the Tate family and the hunt club that leases the property allowed us to go rockhounding on their beautiful land. Ray Borders, our new CCGMS Field Trip Team Leader, handled much of the coordination of the trip.
We thought that we would be collecting marble and garnet in amphibolites or schist. However when we got to the property Rocky instantly found a large granite pegmatite with big muscovite plates, feldspar crystals and a large broken tourmaline crystal.
At our next stop members went to work on the big boulders of marble and found beautiful pieces of white, peach and gold marble. Further along we stopped at a collecting site for our blue to blue-green rock that is rich in the mineral called tremolite and has quartz replacement for the calcite making it much harder than the marble. There was a new road cut on the property and we were able to find some nice muscovite pieces but seemed to have missed the large tourmaline crystals that one of the hunt club members found by an unearthed tree on the new road. He also found a broken flint arrowhead there.
The marble at Tate is a metamorphism of an ancient limestone reef. The red garnets on the black amphibolites background found there are the result of metamorphism of ancient basaltic lava flows. After the metamorphism was over, igneous intrusions cut across the metamorphic rocks to deposit pegmatites of granite with coarse crystals of tourmaline and muscovite.
The marble in the Tate area was first used by Indians in 800 AD and continues to be an important commodity today. The marble from this area has been used in many famous buildings in the US including the Lincoln Memorial, House Office Building, East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, National Air and Space Museum, and the New York Stock Exchange Annex to name a few.
We ended our trip very anxious to go back and find out what more there is to find on this beautiful property and to collect tourmaline as well as the marble and amphibolites and pegmatites. We were very pleased to be asked if we would like to come back!
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