Barite

specimen number:
2102332

location:
PAGA Mine, Cartersville, Bartow Co., Georgia, USA

description:
Pale bluish gray lustrous and translucent crystal cluster of barite with little attached matrix. In good condition.

The Paga mine complex, situated within the world-class Cartersville Mining District of Bartow County, Georgia, United States, is a historic and highly prolific mineral locality celebrated for producing vast commercial quantities of industrial barite alongside sharply formed, translucent to white tabular barite crystal specimens. Geologically, these extensive economic deposits are classified as residual sedimentary accumulations hosted within thick, deeply weathered blankets of brown residual clay and jasperoid breccia. This dense clay was derived from the intense, long-term chemical weathering and leaching of the underlying Cambrian-age Rome Formation and Shady Dolomite strata, which originally contained primary hydrothermal barite veins deposited by warm, mineral-bearing fluids moving along regional fault zones. Historically, organized development of the site as a large-scale open-cast quarrying operation began around July 1917, when early operators like P. C. Renfroe opened the initial cuts before selling the property in 1919 to the newly formed Paga Mining Company, which expanded the workings into a series of massive pits known as Paga Numbers 1, 2, and 3. Commercial extraction utilizing specialized hydraulic log washers and steam shovels to separate the heavy barium sulfate from the sticky host clay ran consistently through the mid-twentieth century, playing a vital role in establishing Georgia as a premier domestic supplier of barite for the oil drilling and chemical industries until primary operations at the main Paga cuts wound down and ceased around the late 1950s.

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