The Palermo Mine

The mine is not open to the public. That is the first thing to know about it.

Groton, in Grafton County, New Hampshire, states it plainly: although not open to the public, the Palermo Mine in North Groton is noted for its minerals. The US Geological Survey lists Palermo1 as a past producer of beryllium in Grafton County, with beryl as the ore. So the honest route to this ground runs through the owners or a mineral club, not through turning up with a hammer.

The town around it is very small, 569 people at the 2020 census, and it has been renamed once. It began as Cockermouth, after Charles Wyndham, Baron Cockermouth and Earl of Egremont, who was Britain's Secretary of State for the Southern Department from 1761 to 1763. Nobody settled it, so the land was regranted in 1766 and renewed in 1772. In 1796 one of the later grantees, Samuel Blood, got it renamed after his own home town of Groton, Massachusetts.

It was a working landscape rather than a rich one. The surface is uneven, though farmers found the soil good enough for corn and potatoes, and the water did the rest of the work: a branch of the Baker River in the north and several small streams feeding Newfound Lake in the south powered the mills. By 1859, when 776 people lived here, there were ten sawmills, two gristmills and a maker of shingles and clapboard.

The town still trades on what moves through it. In 2009 Groton approved the siting of a wind farm, which was built by Iberdrola Renewables.

If you want to see New Hampshire pegmatite minerals without an access problem, this is the wrong pin and Ruggles Mine in Grafton is the right one. Palermo is here because of what it produced and what it means to collectors, not because you can walk onto it.