Aragonite (19th century)

specimen number:
1052764

location:
Bisbee, Cochise Co., Arizona, USA

description:
A neat very early piece from Bisbee, this dates to the 19th century and at one time was part of the collection of Wilhelm Hoyer. Stalactitic white crystallized aragonite across the top of matrix. In good condition. The specimen comes with an antique label as shown at the end of the video.

The Bisbee mining district, situated in the Mule Mountains of Cochise County, Arizona, was one of the premier producers of copper, silver, and gold in the United States. Geologically, the area features a complex structural setting centered around the Sacramento Hill porphyry stock, where Late Cretaceous-age igneous intrusions intersected thick Paleozoic sedimentary sequences, most notably the Escabrosa Limestone. Hydrothermal fluids generating from these intrusions produced massive, high-grade copper-sulfide replacement bodies (mantos) in the deeper limestone strata, while extensive near-surface supergene oxidation and enrichment created world-renowned zones of spectacular secondary copper minerals, including exceptional specimens of azurite, malachite, cuprite, and chrysocolla. Historically, formal prospecting began in 1877, leading to the development of the legendary Copper Queen Mine and the establishment of the bustling town of Bisbee. Large-scale corporate operations under Phelps Dodge Corporation expanded rapidly via a dense network of underground shafts and, later, the massive Lavender Pit open-cut quarry, supplying critical industrial metals through both World Wars. Due to the eventual depletion of the high-grade ores and rising operational costs, large-scale commercial extraction rapidly wound down in the mid-1970s, culminating in the permanent cessation of all major corporate mining and open-pit operations in the district by late 1975.

Wilhelm Hoyer was a notable nineteenth-century German engineer, educator, and avid mineral collector based in Hannover who compiled a highly systematic regional and international mineral collection. Geologically, Hoyer focused his personal collecting efforts on the diverse sedimentary, evaporite, and hydrothermal ore deposits of Lower Saxony and the Harz Mountains, amassing carefully documented representative suites of calcite, fluorite, gypsum, and various base-metal sulfides. Historically, his active collecting period spanned the mid-to-late 1800s while he served as a professor of mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule Hannover, during which time he maintained active exchanges with leading German mineralogists and commercial dealers to expand his cabinet. Following his death, his curated collection of several thousand meticulously labeled specimens was preserved intact when it was acquired by the major regional natural history museum in Hannover in the late nineteenth century, providing modern researchers with a clean historical record of European mineral localities before many of those historic localities were permanently closed or lost.

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