30 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



product of refined crystalline graphite in the country. The property 

 is worked by the Joseph Dixon Crucible Co. who convert the 

 graphite into various commercial grades and products for the 

 market. The mineral occurs as disseminated flakes in a hard quart- 

 zite, constituting only a few per cent of the rock mass, and its 

 extraction and refining require special mechanical treatment, as 

 well as much technical skill, to make the outcome successful from 

 a market standpoint. 



A new firm — the Graphite Products Corporation — was engaged 

 last year in developing a property near Kings Station, 4 miles north 

 of Saratoga Springs, on the easterly face of the ridge of crystalline 

 rocks that defines the Adirondack boundary in this region. The 

 property was worked in a small way by the Saratoga Graphite Co. 

 during the years 1912 and 1913, but has since been idle. The latter 

 company erected a small milling plant and made a little output of 

 graphite from rock which was taken from outcropping ledges, of 

 which there are several in the vicinity. The deposits were not 

 sufficiently opened to permit work to be carried on advantageously. 

 The present operations have been on a larger scale, with the view to 

 thoroughly testing the deposits and the methods best adapted for 

 milling the rock. It would appear from the exploratory work that 

 the quartzite exists in beds of considerable thickness and extent 

 which in general have a northeasterly strike parallel with the ridge 

 and southeasterly dip. The first place where the rock shows in 

 force is along the face of the ridge, just northwest of the old mill, 

 where a quarry pit exposes 10 to 12 feet of 'quartzite, all of it 

 graphitic, in thinly laminated and weathered condition. This pit 

 is not now worked, but supplied much of the material in the earlier 

 operations. The graphite is in finely divided scales, most of them 

 less than 1 mm in diameter, and is mixed with a little brown mica. 

 The outcrop is badly weathered and softened through oxidation of 

 the contained pyrite which is rather plentiful in the unweathered 

 rock. Higher up, near the summit of the ridge, a second outcrop of 

 the graphitic rock was explored in the early operations by an open 

 cut that reveals the quartzite in more massive beds, with a coarser 

 flake. The beds dip to the southeast at a small angle. Along with 

 the usual components, there is more or less pegmatitic material 

 which forms knots and stringers in the quartzite, probably due to 

 injection from a granite magma. The pit, as left by the operations 

 of the first company, was 75 feet long and 30 feet wide. Between 

 the two pits intervenes an area of hornblende gneiss which has the 

 appearance of a metamorphosed gabbro. At present the main work 



