Cartersville Mining District, Bartow County, Georgia, USAi

Regional Level Types
Cartersville Mining District	Mining District
Bartow County	County
Georgia	State
USA	Country

A baryte mining area containing about 35 mines, with a productive area 4.5 miles long with a northerly trend, and a width of about 2 miles.

The ore deposits of the district are associated with rocks of Early Cambrian age - the Weisner, the Shady, and the Rome formations, listed in ascending order.

The Weisner formation in this area is more than 1,000 feet thick and consists chiefly of micaceous shale with many intercalcated layers of quartzite, a few beds of conglomerate, metasiltstone and crystalline limestone. The rocks of the formation are resistant to weathering and therefore crop out on the ridges. Nearly all of the ridges are asymmetrical anticlines.

The Shady formation, a discontinuous unit between the Weisner and Rome formations attains a maximum thickness of 30 feet. It consists of a sequence of beds of siliceous specular hematite and thin beds of dolomite that are fossiliferous in places. In the zone of weathering the dolomite is leached and the hematite is altered to ocherous and umberous clays in which the original bedding planes are preserved; locally they have been distorted by slumping.

The Rome formation has two members in this district. One contains crystalline carbonate rocks and the other metashale. The carbonate rocks are largely dolomite and are 500 to 1,200 feet thick. A few pinnacles and boulders of dolomite remain in the baritic residual clays over the dolomite. The residual clay is derived not only from the insoluble residue of the dolomite but also from the constituents of the former overlying shales. All of the residual material from the shale and dolomite has been thoroughly mixed by slumping into caverns and sinkholes. The clays derived from the Rome formation occur on the slopes of the ridges and parts of the adjacent valleys. These clays are yellow to brown, tough, and are over 100 feet thick in many places.

On the lower slopes of the ridges the residual clays containing the barite generally are covered by a mantle of red clay that averages 20 to 50 feet thick and contrasts markedly with the color of the clays underneath.

The residual clay that forms the matrix for the barite also contains other hard fragmental materials, the most common of which are angular pieces of jasperoid stained yellow by ferric hydroxide.

The barite of the residual deposits is similar to that exposed in the scattered and irregular veins in the dolomite. The fragments are irregular and range from a fraction of an inch to about 4 feet in diameter, although the average is probably less than 6 inches. The fragments also contain small amounts of quartz and sulfides, the latter of which have been largely destroyed by weathering.

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