| Maine Feldspar, Families, and Feuds |
| Introduction: Maine Feldspar, Families, and Feuds is a fourth book in the planned series, although it may be the first that will be available at the newsstands. Unlike the first three volumes, this one will be primarily a twentieth century history of Oxford County mining, including the details of the West Paris feldspar mill. The evolution of mining in Oxford County starts with gems at Mount Mica in 1821. Sturtevant (1948) first questioned the validity of the earlier widely quoted date of Mount Mica's discovery that had first appeared in Augustus Hamlin's, The Tourmaline in 1873 and repeated in his History of Mount Mica in 1895. Actually, Hamlin's pre-Civil War history of Mount Mica is full of flaws, including dates, family actions, names of visiting dignitaries, etc. (King, 2006). Hamlin was also a revisionist historian and his ommissions are as serious as his errors. The myth about Mount Mica being discovered by "boys" was started by C. A. Stephens who wrote about the discovery in a fictional account in 1878 in the Youth's Companion and later featured in one of his Knockabout Club books. By the 1870's there began to be a search for other minerals in Oxford County. Mica was a target mineral at Mount Mica, while the silver boom of coastal Maine of the late 1870's to early 1880's was also active in Woodstock and nearby towns. In 1898 through 1901, more or less, a true mica boom occurred in Oxford County, through the efforts of Winfield Scott Robinson, Clarence Leslie Potter, Hiram Francis Abbott, Oliver Gildersleve, and others. The mica boom finally evaporated in 1906, but the newly formed Maine Feldspar Company of Auburn developed an interest in the Twitchell Quarry on Paris Hill. Eventually, the Maine Feldspar Company had an interest in the Bennett Quarry in Buckfield. At the same time, there were interesting national economic factors at work and a feldspar grinding mill was organized though the efforts of Alfred Columbus Perham. The Perham Quarry in West Paris and the Bumpus Quarry in Albany were very important in the life of the early mill and the expansion of the feldspar mining industry in Oxford County. Over the course of half a century, the local feldspar industry depended on the mill. When the mill closed, so did the feldspar quarries. In between times, there were turbulent effects: family and company feuding, bankrupcies, employment in a hard work occupation, etc. For some, the effects of the Great Depression were lessened. For others, the mill was a predator. In between, there were many who earned a passable living. Primary Sources and a Partial Analysis of a Revered History Book � This [sic] History of Mount Mica, Journal of the Geo-Literary Society, v. 21 [2006], #3, p. 5-23. |
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| Maine Feldspar Company crew at the Bennett Quarry, 1924. |