Last post, we visited the kaolin and ochre miners reported to have unearthed a giant frog in 1865. So how did kaolin and ochre end up in Forestdale? For a moment, let's focus on kaolin. According to the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, kaolin deposits are found in a narrow north-south band at the base of Cheshire quartzite formations. Excellent examples of Cheshire quartzite formations include Rattlesnake Cliffs, Whiterocks Cliffs, and Bristol Cliffs. Kaolin forms as fine particles are washed off cliff faces by rain and settle in layers where the water slows down or stops moving. In other words, kaolin is Cheshire quartzite mud.

All that quartzite formed roughly 400-600 million years ago at the bottom of the Iapetus Ocean. (If you’re a total mythology nerd, you might recall that Iapetus was the father of Atlas, the namesake of the Atlantic Ocean.) It started out as layers of sand. With enough heat and pressure, the sand turned to sandstone and then more heat and pressure turned the sandstone to quartzite. If you take either the Upper or Lower Cliff Trails heading out of the Branbury State Park campground, you’ll come across a lovely quartzite step that has retained the ripples that were laid down in the sand on the bottom of the Iapetus Ocean.

The kaolin formed beneath these quartzite formations is relatively rare, and the best examples in Vermont were found in Bennington, Monkton, and Forestdale. The Bennington kaolin was used for porcelain and glazes on Bennington Pottery. Forestdale and Monkton kaolins were used to make paint. As far as I could tell, Horn, Crockett, and Company produced paint on Paintworks Road until 1924. (Let me know if I don’t have that right!) The Vermont Kaolin Company in Monkton was in production until 1965.

Producing paint involved crushing the kaolin back into fine particles and mixing it with water, removing impurities through a series of settling basins, and drying the resulting product to varying degrees depending on the paint being produced. The Horn, Crockett settling basins are on the east side of McConnell Road, directly in front of the kaolin pit. The manufacturing buildings were on the north side of Paintworks Road, and the drying sheds on the south side.

Ochre is similar but even more unusual than kaolin. It is formed when iron oxides (i.e., rust) mixes with the fine quartzite particles to form a red-orange clay. This was particularly desirable in early American paints. Kaolin and ochre were discovered by Brandonites who were actually looking for iron ore, so the two stories are closely linked. In the next post, we’ll take a look at the iron industry in Brandon.

Len Schmidt and Jennie Masterson live on Wolf Tree Forest, a wild, working woodlot about 2 miles from the old Paintworks.