U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 99-148-A
Geologic Maps and Block Diagrams of the Barite Hill Gold-Silver Deposit and Vicinity, South Carolina and Georgia
Barite Hill is a metavolcanic-rock-hosted, stratiform gold-silver deposit located in the Piedmont physiographic province in McCormick County, South Carolina. The Barite Hill deposit was mined from 1990 to 1994, and, during this time, approximately 1,835,000 grams of gold and 3,390,280 grams of silver were produced. The purpose of this report is to make available a regional geologic map, and geologic maps and block diagrams of the Barite Hill Mine area to supplement published reports.
The Barite Hill deposit is interpreted to be the result of Kuroko-type submarine volcanogenic base-metal sulfide mineralization followed by precious metal deposition under epithermal conditions. Six stages of evolution of the Barite Hill deposit are identified and related to the regional volcanic, tectonic, and thermal history.
Host rocks for the Barite Hill deposit are sericitically-altered, felsic metavolcanic and metasedimentary rocks of the Late Proterozoic Persimmon Fork Formation, which consists of the Lincolnton metaryholite and the overlying lower and upper pyroclastic units. The Barite Hill deposit lies stratigraphically below an overturned contact between the upper and lower pyroclastic units. Gold-silver-rich zones in the Main Pit are partly coincident with lenses of siliceous barite rock, but not confined to them, and occur more commonly in pyrite-quartz altered fragmental rock. The stratigraphically uppermost of four ore zones in the Main Pit is overlain by a zone of barite and base-metal enrichment, which is, in turn, overlain by a talc-tremolite alteration zone. Siliceous barite zones are absent in the Rainsford Pit and gold-silver minerals are associated with silicified rocks and chert.
This report is stored in Portable Document Format.
Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to view it.
If you already have Acrobat Reader 3.0 (or later) installed
on your computer, click here to download the complete report (1,544 K).
If you wish to download Acrobat Reader
free of charge, click here.
U.S. Department of the Interior
U.S. Geological Survey
This page is <URL: https://pubs.usgs.gov/openfile/99-148a/>
Maintained by: Eastern Publications Group Web Team
Last modified 17 September 1999
For more information about this report contact Sandra H.B. Clark at shbclark@usgs.gov