Sweet Old Memories: The Crystal Mine

A few years ago Jack Maine's granddaughter found some pretty stones in the gravel behind his diner, Sweet Old Memories. The pretty stones turned out to be calcite crystals, lots of them. In fact, there were so many crystals that Jack Maine was later told by geologists that his diner was sitting on one of the biggest calcite crystal deposits in the state.

So, after eating lunch or dinner at Sweet Old Memories, you can buy yourself some calcite crystals to take home with you. In the future, when Jack has everything ready, you'll be able to go out behind the diner and dig your own calcite crystals. Right now he's working on getting the necessary funding to promote the Sweet Old Memories' crystal mine, with the idea being to set it up so that kids will have fun being amateur geologists.

Okay, so what is a calcite crystal, anyway? Well, it's a crystal made of calcite, naturally. Calcite itself is often the main constituent of the shells of marine organisms, such as plankton, oysters and echinoderms. It's also found in sedimentary rocks, like limestone, which is made from the shells of dead marine organisms. Stalactites and stalagmites in caves also contain calcite.

Calcite crystals are either colorless or white, although impurities can result in colored calcite crystals: gray, red, yellow, green and etc.

Calcite seas were formed when the calcium carbonate in ocean waters was low-magnesium calcite, instead of the high-magnesium calcite found today. That would be back in the Jurassic Period, which was before T-Rex's time.

Put all this together and you basically get evidence that the land around Vernon used to be at the bottom of the ocean, somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 million years ago.

For any further info about calcite crystals, you'll have to consult a geologist, of which I'm not one. Sorry about that.

But I've seen some of the crystals, and they're sure interesting. And another potential Herkimer Diamond Mine in Central New York is a good thing. Maybe with the right funding and support the crystal mine behind Sweet Old Memories could be turned into an educational center of sorts, a place for local schools to bus kids to for field trips.