Chrysoberyl with Garnet (ex Allen Heyl Collection)

Item Description

This piece came to me as being from the Gillette Quarry, but I have been given more detailed information on its origin, thanks to Harold Moritz. This piece is from a small pegmatite, which is now obliterated, across the river from Haddam Neck (which is the part of Haddam east of the Conn. River) that was originally in the cellar of a house on Walkley Hill Road. The locality was discovered at Haddam in
1810 by Archibald Bruce. The famous Dana locality was originally in the cellar of the old Brainerd House, on Walkely Hill Road. There is no exposure of the pegmatite or associated gneiss at the spot now. Wesleyan University probably got the last material from the locality,
but the small blast which was set off in the yard broke all the windows in the house. It is the first place in the world where chrysoberyl was found in matrix, being known only from alluvial deposits before. Drawings of the Haddam crystals are in Goldschmidt, specimens are at Yale, Harvard, Wesleyan, AMNH in New York. This piece features a few sharp, distinct, somewhat lustrous, tabular yellow-green twinned crystals of Chrysoberyl frozen against a matrix of deep red Garnet (probably Spessartine) and grey Smoky Quartz. The Chrysoberyl group, which measures 2.7 cm across, is contacted on one end, but the terminations are visible and complete, even though they are slightly pushed into the matrix. A great specimen of this rarely seen material from Connecticut.