Bumpus Quarry

Beryl crystals twenty-seven feet long came out of this hole, the largest weighing 26 tonnes.

Bumpus quarry sits in Oxford County, Maine, and it is known above all for producing some of the largest beryl crystals ever found anywhere. The USGS lists it as a past producer of feldspar, mica, beryllium and cesium, and gives directions a collector can actually use: take Route 5 south from Bethel for 7.75 miles, and the mine dumps are visible on the east side of the road.

It was opened in 1927 by Harry E. Bumpus on land leased from the Cummings family, and he worked it by hand for feldspar until 1933. Harold Perham took over the mining in 1934, and in 1936 the title passed to the United Feldspar and Minerals Corporation. Then it got complicated. Nobody could establish who now held the mineral rights, the Bumpus family and the corporation went to law over it, and the mine sat officially closed from 1940 to 1945 while the case ran. It flooded during the shutdown, and the Department of the Interior surveyed the area several times.

The two sides settled in 1945. Dan C. Douglas began pumping it out that April and had it open again by the end of the year, and in 1949 United Feldspar took full control while Douglas formed the Northern Mining Corporation to lease the mineral rights. It was around then that the great beryls came out, the largest of all in 1949.

It closed in 1966, after a worker was killed by falling rocks. The property changed hands several times before that and once more afterwards: in 2005 it was bought by Lawrence Stifler and Mary Mcfadden, who intended to reopen it as an educational site about the mining history of Oxford County. Tours now run for amateur geologists and school groups.

The beryl is the headline, in aquamarine and heliodor. The rest of the list is long: feldspar, hematite, pyrite, rose and smoky quartz, rutile and zircon.