When Sam Ruggles purchased a portion of the mountainside in 1805, there was a burgeoning market for mica. Ruggles “found that he could sell [the mineral] at a really good price,” says Fred Davis, author of U.S. Mica Industry Pioneers. But Ruggles “didn’t really advertise much. It was, you know, almost like he was selling it piecemeal,” says Davis. When someone requested some mica in his Boston grocery store, he could supply it. In 1834, Ruggles’s son George took over the mica business—that’s when things really started taking off.
Demand for mica grew rapidly as shipbuilding and train travel flourished. Mica’s heat-resistant, elastic durability was used for window panes where glass would’ve been too fragile. The younger Ruggles started running ads as far afield as Cincinnati. He hired 25 “drillers” to work full-time at the mine. He even exhibited a 200-pound, coffee table-sized piece of mica at the Great Exhibition in London earning him an honorable mention.
In 1863, George Ruggles died suddenly and without a will, casting the future of Ruggles Mine into doubt. Eventually, another branch of the Ruggles family, the Randalls, took over the mine—but operations became embroiled in lawsuits, claims, and counterclaims to the site. “At one point, the sheriff in Grafton had seized the property and locked the Randalls out,” says Davis.
After the Randalls lost the property, a series of companies leased Ruggles Mine. In the early 20th century, the scouring powder company Bon Ami mined feldspar, a soft coarse mineral, from the site as an abrasive for their cleaners. During World War II, the U.S. government surveyed the site for mica to use in radar technology. But by the early 1960s, commercial mining activity had ceased at Ruggles.
In 1961, Geraldine and Arvid Wahlstrom purchased Ruggles Mine for $20,000 and transformed the site into a beloved rockhounding attraction. “I was up there when I was a little kid collecting mica and peeling it apart,” remembers Scott Rielly, the current president of the Micromounters of New England, a New Hampshire-based mineral club. “It’s really been a landmark for people, you know, as a gateway to get into geology and minerals.” Rielly has even brought his children to the site.
When the Wahlstroms divorced in the early 1970s, Geraldine continued running the site for decades. For only $7 (in the attraction’s early days), visitors could chip away at the mine’s walls, filling buckets upon buckets with minerals. “It’s quite awe-inspiring, particularly to a younger kid with a growing interest in minerals,” says mineral collector Tom Mortimer, who visited the site as a teenager.