Boston Mineral Club

Welcome to the Boston Mineral Club website! If you have suggestions, questions or comments about the site, please use the Contact page.

You do not need a college degree in earth sciences to join the club! We are open to all. We welcome and encourage new members to join the club. Membership 

What We Do

The Boston Mineral Club (BMC) was founded in 1936 to "promote the study and collecting of rocks and minerals, to encourage friendly cooperation among mineralogists and collectors, [and] to promote the study of mineralogy and related arts and sciences coming within the purview of earth sciences..."

In the pursuit of these goals, the BMC offers educational programs at club meetings, mineral collecting field trips, a newsletter, and access to our mineralogical reference library.

The Boston Mineral Club is a member of the American Federation of Mineral Societies and the Eastern Federation of Mineral and Lapidary Societies.

Field Trips

The Boston Mineral Club is proud of its long tradition of conducting field trips to collecting localities throughout the New England area. Information about trips planned for the current year is published in our newsletters which can be found in the member's only area of the website. 

The club also organizes occasional trips to localities outside of New England. Previous destinations have included Nova Scotia, Kentucky, Georgia and Arizona. You can view photos of our 2009 trip to Nova Scotia here: recent trip to Nova Scotia.

Members can Download the December
Newsletter   HERE

 Upcoming BMC Meetings

Tuesday, 3 December 2013

Program: The Fillow Quarry at Branchville, CT: A Classic Mineral Locality

Presented by: Harold (Fritz) Moritz

This year's December Boston Mineral Club meeting will feature a presentation by Harold (Fritz) Moritz on a classic Connecticut mineral locality, the Fillow Quarry at the village of Branchville. Fritz is a geologist, mineral specimen collector and photographer. As a native of Connecticut, a state with very diverse geology and mineralogy, he has been collecting and researching the history of minerals from there since the mid-1970s, when he was about 14 years young. In the early 1990s, he became a founding member of the Sterling Hill Mining Museum and has been collecting in and learning about the magnificent Franklin-Ogdensburg, New Jersey, USA zinc deposits ever since. His collection numbers about 3300 specimens mostly from these two areas. He is very active in several Connecticut mineral/gem clubs. After 24 years as an environmental consultant, he now works part time as a contract photographer for MineralMovies.com and Stonetrust.com and is photographing his collection. He has provided the following introduction to his presentation:

“First opened in 1876, the Fillow Quarry immediately became the type locality for 9 new minerals, the most for any Connecticut locality. Their descriptions were published by Brush and Dana of Yale in the late 1800s. Rich in phosphate and lithium, this pegmatite served as both a scientific and economic resource (feldspar, quartz, muscovite) until WWII.  Specimens contributed to the understanding of the alteration of spodumene; the chemistry of amblygonite-montebrasite, columbite-tantalite and apatite group minerals; as well as the nature of the atom and the age of the Earth. Several investigators studied the formation of pegmatites. Richly illustrated, this presentation will show fine examples of the minerals found there, both common and rare, and some surprisingly fluorescent, many from the large collection amassed by Ronald Januzzi.”

Fritz has numerous mineral photos of specimens from this locality on mindat. If you want to do a little homework before the meeting check out the mindat locality page for the Fillow Quarry at http://www.mindat.org/loc-6816.html.

To complement the presentation BMC members are encouraged to bring in their favorite specimens from Connecticut localities. The BMC display case will be available to display and protect your specimens.

Please note that the Harvard Mineralogical Museum will be open to us from 7 to 8 PM as usual and refreshments will be provided during the meeting. The meeting will conclude with a mineral raffle.

- Nate Martin, BMC President

 We Welcome Visitors & New Members!

PLEASE NOTE: Parking for BMC meetings is in the new underground parking garage at 52 Oxford Street. The entrance to this lot is just opposite Everett Street and is the same entrance that we formerly used to park in the old surface lot beside the museum. Please see the map at the bottom of the meetings page.

The BMC meets monthly from September to June, on the first Tuesday, (second Tuesday if a three day holiday, such as Labor Day, precedes the first Tuesday). Other exceptions are noted in the Newsletter.

Meetings are held at 7:30 PM in the Harvard University Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge MA. If you are standing facing the entrance to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, turn to your right. You will see another door at the top of some steps about 10 to 20 yards away. That is the entrance to the Geological Lecture Hall.

The mineral displays of the Harvard Mineralogical Museum are open to BMC members free of charge between 7:00 and 8:00 PM before each meeting. The BMC also hosts a mid-winter  fund raising auction of mineral specimens and related material.

Evening programs include a short business meeting. The program is usually an educational presentation on a mineralogical topic, supported by projected slides, exhibits, or videos. Speakers may be experts in the Earth Sciences academic community, professional mineralogists or geologists, or veteran collectors from outside or within the BMC. A specimen raffle concludes the evening.