12/31/2023 0 Comments Rose quartz near meThe Concord Enterprise noted it in 1892, while reporting on the funeral of Emerson’s widow Lidian: “A great pine stands near the head of grave, on which is paced a huge boulder of pink quartz in its native state. No one seems to know exactly where Emerson’s chunk of rose quartz came from or when it was installed, but it was certainly in place by September 1891, when its presence was remarked by a traveler. It holds the remains of numerous literary luminaries, including Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau, buried near one another on Authors Ridge. Sleepy Hollow, like Mount Auburn, is a “rural” cemetery, laid out in a wooded tumble of glacial deposits. Starting in the late nineteenth century, you might find bereaved families who wanted to use them to commemorate their loved ones.Īn early and very prominent quartz monument was the one placed, belatedly and after much family discussion, upon the grave of philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, MA. If you are a quarry operator, what do you do with otherwise useless chunks of quartz? Naturally, you try to find a market for them. īeryl, feldspar, mica, spodumene, and other pegmatite minerals were and are in great demand for industrial purposes and as collector’s items, whereas the quartz is mostly a waste material. Mineralogists, having long debated what causes the pinkish coloring of rose quartz, recently concluded that the color is due to minute amounts of a Fe-Ti mineral akin to dumortierite. Quartz comes in several hues-white, smoky, rose, pink, and amethyst-depending on trace elements in the matrix or environmental conditions. In and among these giants are found masses of quartz, which is usually the last thing to crystallize as the fluid cools. Other pegmatites have yielded huge sheets of mica and lenses of spodumene. The Bumpus Mine, for example, yielded a single beryl crystal that was 27 feet long, and equally gigantic feldspar crystals. The water, circulating freely for eons, permits the growth of enormous minerals. Pegmatites are the crystallized remains of this rare-element-and-quartz-rich soup, and their contents are often astonishing. Leftover after this early process, wandering lonely in a boiling slurry of water and silica, are the geeks and wallflowers among the elements: oddities such as beryllium, boron, titanium, and lithium, whose size or geometry make it difficult for them to form minerals unless there is a lot of circulating fluid (the social director?). One can picture this process as a sort of dating game, in which popular elements find partners, pair up, and remove themselves from circulation. These elements combine to form granite’s common minerals-mica, pyroxene, feldspar, and quartz (SiO 4)-as the melt cools. The chief elements in the hot granitic melt are silicon, oxygen, aluminum, calcium, iron, magnesium, and sodium. Granites are formed from low-density molten material that makes its ways slowly up through earth’s continental crust from depth. Three factors contributed to their appearance at the Cemetery: 1) the opening of pegmatite quarries in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Maine, such as the Bumpus pegmatite quarry in Oxford County, Maine, opened in 1927 2) an increasing fashion for “natural” boulder monuments and 3) the New England Hurricane of September 1938. Mount Auburn has over twenty such boulder monuments, made of rose quartz, dating from the late 1930s onward. What are these stones, where did they come from, and what do they mean? Throughout Mount Auburn Cemetery and many other burial places in the United States, visitors come upon rough boulders of pink translucent stone bearing nameplates of bronze or slate.
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