Boston Mineral Club

Winter/Spring 2017 Meeting Dates

Tuesday, February 7th.

Tuesday, March 7th.

Tuesday, April 4th.

Tuesday, May 2nd.

Tuesday, June 6th. 

No Meetings in July and August

Fall 2017 Meeting Dates

Tuesday, September 12th.

Tuesday, October 3rd.

Tuesday, November 7th.

Tuesday, December 5th. 

Boston Mineral Club meetings are educational in nature and are always open to the public. We welcome visitors!

 Information on Meeting Location and Parking can be found on our main Meeting Page

The May 2017 BMC Meeting is Tuesday, May 2^nd – 7:00 PM

Program: The Collection and Cataloging of John H. Marshall (1931-2008)

Speaker: Bud Poulin 

The May 2017 meeting of the Boston Mineral Club will take place on Tuesday, 2 May. Our speaker will be Bud Poulin, and his topic will be “The Collection and Cataloging of John H. Marshall”.

Bud Poulin has been a New Englander all his life. He was born in Maine and at a young age moved to Connecticut, where he has lived ever since.  He is an avid mineral collector of pegmatite minerals, New England minerals, and micromounts.  A few years back he became fascinated with the collection of John Marshall and John’s collecting style. He has provided the following introduction to his presentation:

John H. Marshall was born in Massachusetts in 1931.  He grew up in Newton, MA. .John had a great interest in nature and the outdoors starting as a young man, and continuing throughout his life.  John found his first mineral specimen when he was thirteen, a nice piece of rose quartz.  John kept this specimen throughout his long collecting career (more than sixty years) and this specimen became his catalog #1 piece.  This rose quartz became just one of more than 4,000 minerals in his diverse collection. John developed a great interest in collecting from this time on.  John would start reading about some of the local quarries and would visit many in Massachusetts on his bicycle, even riding all the way to Strickland Quarry in Portland, CT (over 50 miles away).

John cataloged his collection with 3x5 inch preprinted cards – modeled after John Sinkankas’s catalog cards.  Each card was filled out by hand with great care and neatness; and kept in glassine envelopes.  Nearly every specimen has very small hand written labels with his initials, catalog number, and specimen information.  These specimen labels are usually a quarter inch or smaller, he took great care to make sure they were all precise and easy to read.  He had wonderful handwriting.

This presentation will talk about John’s life and his style of collecting and cataloging his collection.

To complement the presentation, members are encouraged to bring in any interesting John Marshall specimens from their collections. Since John seemed to have a special interest in pyromorphite from Loudville, MA and Phoenixville, PA, good specimens from those localities would also be of interest even if not from John’s collection. The BMC display case will be available to display and protect your specimens. Refreshments also will be available.  The Harvard mineral museum should be open to us starting at 6:30 PM. Please plan to arrive by 7:00 PM to socialize and set up any specimens you have brought to display. BMC VP Mike Haritos will start the brief business portion of the meeting around 7:30 PM and begin the presentation shortly thereafter. After the presentations are completed the meeting will conclude with our traditional mineral specimen raffle.

Visitors are always welcome to attend BMC meetings. Invite a friend to come with you!



Tuesday, April 4^th – 7:00 PM

Speaker: Harold (Fritz) Moritz

Topic: Connecticut’s Fabulous Minerals & Gems: A Photographic Celebration 

The April 2017 meeting of the Boston Mineral Club will take place on Tuesday, 4 April. Our speaker will be Harold (Fritz) Moritz, and his topic will be Connecticut’s Fabulous Minerals & Gems. 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. Fritz also 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:

"Connecticut has hundreds of minerals.  But what are the most “important” ones? That depends on what criteria are used, but certainly from a collector’s viewpoint, aesthetics tops the list, especially gem quality.  In this presentation, I have selected what I consider to be the top 20 or so Connecticut minerals that are common, have the best crystals and/or make the best gem stones.  This one is all eye candy, just tons of photos I have made over the last several years of beautiful and local stuff!"

To complement the presentation, members are encouraged to bring in a few of their favorite Connecticut mineral specimens. The BMC display case will be available to display and protect your specimens. Refreshments also will be available.  The Harvard mineral museum should be open to us starting at 6:30 PM. Please plan to arrive by 7:00 PM to socialize and set up any specimens you have brought to display. BMC VP Mike Haritos will start the brief business portion of the meeting around 7:30 PM and begin the presentation shortly thereafter. After the presentations are completed the meeting will conclude with our traditional mineral specimen raffle.

Visitors are always welcome to attend BMC meetings, and this meeting provides another opportunity for visitors to get acquainted and see what the club is all about. Invite a friend to come with you!



BMC Meeting Announcement: Tuesday, March 7^th – 7:00 PM

Speaker: Kevin Czaja,  Topic: American Mineral Heritage – the Harvard Collection

The March meeting of the Boston Mineral Club will be held on Tuesday, 7 March, in Haller Hall (our usual meeting room). Our speaker will be the Assistant Curator of the Mineralogical and Geological Museum at Harvard, Kevin Czaja. Kevin has worked with the Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) Department and Harvard Mineralogical and Geological Museum for nearly 20 years. Kevin has a B.A. from the Univ. of Connecticut, a M.A. from the Univ. at Albany and a M.A. in Environmental Management and Sustainability from the Harvard Extension School. He has been heavily involved in mineralogical study over the last 25 years. A past President of the Boston Mineral Club, his primary interests and expertise involve regional mineralogy, pegmatite mineral assemblages, and mineral identification.

Kevin’s presentation is entitled “American Mineral Heritage – the Harvard Collection”. He has provided the following description of his talk:

“The collections at the Mineralogical and Geological Museum at Harvard (MGMH) date back to the mid 1700s when Harvard University accepted a donation of marbles from the French Consulate.  Since that time the stewards of this collection over the past 150 or so years has been a cast of colorful characters, scientific visionaries, and even one infamous villain!  Over the past year, the MGMH was invited by curator Bob Downs of the University of Arizona Mineral Museum to create a display in the special exhibits wing of the Flandrau Science Museum in Tucson, Arizona that showcased the best stories and Mineral specimens from this colorful past.  With the assistance of Curator Raquel Alonso-Perez, and Collections Manager Theresa Smith, Assistant Curator Kevin Czaja created a 10 case exhibit that attempted to capture the rich history of the MGMH through its collection strength's (gold, New England, classic locales, type specimens and even Arizona to cite a few examples) and collection's sometimes dramatic history.  Kevin will present a summary of this effort to the BMC.”

My wife and I were privileged to attend the opening of the MGMH exhibit while in Tuscon in February of 2016. All I can say is that it was one of the best exhibits I have ever seen. Many of the specimens are so valuable that they were transported to and from Tucson in a Brinks truck and are seldom if ever on display in the MGMH museum. You won’t want to miss this talk!

In keeping with one aspect of this wide ranging presentation, Boston Mineral Club members are encouraged to bring in one or two classic New England mineral specimens from their collections.  The BMC display case will be available to display your specimens.

The Harvard Mineral Museum will be open for us as usual from 6:30 to 7:30 PM.  Refreshments will be available starting at 7:00 PM and the meeting will formally begin at 7:30 PM with a short business meeting led by BMC Vice President, Mike Haritos, before starting the presentation. The evening will end with our traditional mineral specimen raffle.

All of our meetings are open to the public, please feel free to invite a friend to attend and see what the club is all about. 



BMC Meeting Announcement - Tuesday, February 7^th – 7:00 PM

A Combined Meeting with the Boston Malacological Club

Topic: The Minerals and Shells of Africa

This will now be the 7th year in a row that the February meeting of the Boston Mineral Club will be held jointly with the Boston Malacological Club (i.e.: The Shell Club).  Both of our clubs meet at Harvard on the first Tuesday of the month and this combined meeting gives each group a chance to share information about our common interest in collecting beautiful objects from the natural world.  The theme of this combined meeting is “The Minerals and Shells of Africa”.  Several short presentations by members of both clubs will provide an interesting and varied program.

Africa is a huge continent and is rich in mineral resources. Although there are 54 nation states that occupy the African continent, the ones best known for high quality minerals include Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Malawi, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Africa, Tanzania, Zaire, South Zambia and Zimbabwe. In keeping with the theme of the night, all Boston Mineral Club members are encouraged to bring in any special mineral specimens in their collection from any locality in Africa and shell club members similarly are encouraged to bring in any special African shells in their collections.  The BMC display case will be available to display your specimens.

The Harvard mineral museum should be open to us starting at 6:30 PM. Please plan to arrive by 7:00 PM to socialize and set up any specimens you have brought to talk about and display for all to see. Refreshments will be available startiBMCng at 7:30 PM and the meeting will formally begin at 8:00 PM with very short business meetings for both clubs before starting the presentations.

The evening will end with our traditional raffle. This meeting usually attracts a large audience. I hope that you can attend.