Chrysotile Asbestos

 

An ancient, intercontinental slip and slide set the stage for Gila County's abundant chrysotile asbestos deposits.  By the time the amalgamation of the Rodinia Supercontinent got it's gig a goin' on, pieces of modern-day Africa and So. America were attached to the eastern seaboard!  Now we're talkin' EARLY in Earth's history!  The diabase intrusions that eventually became ginormous sills in the billion-year-old Apache Group rocks started out as as paper-thin pulses that radiated their entire length slowly, then swelled and fattened in place.

And while all that diabase swelling and fattening was taking place, it just so happened to be slow cooking the heck out of the adjacent Mescal Limestone.  VOILA!  Asbestos was born!

While the wildly rich Porphyry copper deposits get all the headlines, the persistent diabase sills created yet another profitable mining industry in Gila County.  Asbestos set prospectors hearts aflutter beginning about the time Arizona morphed from a territory to a State.  One of America's early mega money asbestos outfits, Johns-Manville, quickly hopped on the Gila County band wagon and scarfed up all the asbestos claims in Ash Creek Canyon.  Those rich claims would pay Johns-Manville handsome returns for a few decades before fading into the dust bin of history.

Johns-Manville quickly built a rather handsome company town in Ash Creek Canyon.  They called it Chrysotile and the name stuck.  Chrysotile was a happenin' place from 1914-1945. 

This blog is all about Chrysotile, Arizona.  We are indebted to Gene Kunckey for his valiant little book. We highly recommend anyone interested in Chrysotile buy Gene's book. 

There are numerous other primary resources and articles regarding Chrysotile. This humble blog is merely an attempt to assemble those resources into a "one stop shopping" kinda place.  We hope that people contribute to this blog to make it better. Likewise, please consider this blog a typical "work-in-progress".

Note that we bought our copy of Gene's book from Amazon.  It is also widely available from other sources including the Bullion Plaza Cultural Center & Museum in Miami, Arizona.

A close up of chrysotile asbestos.