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Kaolin
The deposits at Elam lie along the upper reaches of Beaver Creek, the works of the Brandywine Summit company lying more or less at the headwaters and the old National Kaolin pit lying downstream to the southwest. See the location map on p. 592 of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey for 1885, and more detailed map after p. 594. (From Ashburner’s report on the Brandywine Summit Kaolin-bed.) The copy at Penn State
<http://collection1.libraries.psu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/pageol/id/39328>, unlike the one on Google Books, has properly scanned maps.
The pits on the southwest were the first to open around 1864: first as Union Kaolin, then William Wharton, then National Kaolin (Harvey & Johns). The northeast pits, the "Brandywine Summit Kaolin Works" didn’t open until 1880. (Ashmead's History of Delaware County, pp. 326-328.) They were opened by John Griffen, of the Phoenix Iron Works in Phoenixville. He started digging clay near Phoenixville, I think for firebrick for his furnaces, and wound up getting into the pottery business as well. Hamilton Graham opened a pit on the adjacent property in 1882, but sold out to the Brandywine Summit Kaolin Works the next year. The kaolin deposits were pretty high-grade, pure white with no impurities to color them (I think National was slightly superior), and so both companies were selling to pottery companies in Trenton, East Liverpool, and so on.
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Feldspar
What eventually happened was that they ran out of readily extracted, high-quality kaolin (the remaining deposits were either discolored or too far below the water table), so the Brandywine Summit operation turned to quarrying feldspar instead. National Kaolin added "Ornamental Brick" to its name and started making bricks from the colored kaolin in 1896. (T.C. Hopkins, Clays of Southeastern Pennsylvania (in part), Appendix to the Annual Report of the Pennsylvania State College Agricultural Experiment Station for 1899, p. 30)
The Brandywine Summit works, which had been managed by William S. Manley since they opened in 1880, were incorporated in March 1887 as the "Brandywine Summit Kaolin and Feldspar Company". The president was Edward Worth, who had a background in ironmaking (his uncle had a rolling mill in Coatesville, and his cousins founded Worth Steel in Claymont). (Jordan, History of Delaware County, v. 2., p. 726) Stone & Hughes, in Feldspar of Pennsylvania, seem to have reversed this; it must have been Worth who bought out S. H. Lund, rather than the other way around. They continued washing kaolin until 1891 (Hopkins, p. 30), but under Worth’s direction, they seem to have rapidly expanded into the feldspar business. This was mostly consumed by the pottery industry, although selected picked spar was used for making false teeth (Bastin, Economic Geology of the Feldspar Deposits of the United States, p. 71); presumably their existing contacts in the pottery industry benefited them.
They built a feldspar mill at Brandywine Summit (Pennsylvania Securities, 1893 says they owned 2 feldspar mills and a kaolin mill; perhaps there were 2 mills at Brandywine Summit, as I never heard of them grinding elsewhere) and ground product from the quarries there. According to Bastin’s description, they crushed the rock in a chaser and then transferred it to tube mills, and had an early dust-collection system. The Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington (PRR subsidiary) opened the Brandywine Summit Branch on February 15, 1888. It was 1.63 miles long, and according to PRR documents, it served both BSK&F’s feldspar mill and the National Kaolin plant. Their milling capacity and rail access allowed them to quarry additional feldspar at locations beyond Brandywine Summit.
In addition to the Brandywine Summit quarries, BSK&F had a microcline quarry at Chatham, and quarried albite at several localities in the serpentine barrens. The latter deposits were obviously of different geological origin. Bastin (p. 69), refers to the "Brandywine Quarry", 200 ft. deep and 70-80 ft. long, which I take to be the "Mystery Hole", operating when he visited in 1906 or 1907. Some of the output from this quarry was ground at the Sparvetta mill; the rest, as well as the output from the Chatham quarry, went by rail to the Brandywine Summit mill. At the Sparvetta mill, the soda feldspar was kiln-heated and then sprayed with cold water to shatter it before crushing;(The Mineral Industry, v. 18 (for 1909), p. 257) Bastin (p. 71) says the same process was used at the Brandywine Summit mill, while the K-spar was crushed and ground as it came from the quarry. In 1916, Watts refers to the "Brandywine quarry" as "numerous small pits", from 60 to 80 feet deep, 1 mile north of Sylmar station. (Watts, The Feldspars of the New England and North Appalachian States, p. 156) The "Old Brandywine Quarry" described by Bastin was by then water-filled and said to be exhausted. A "New Brandywine Quarry" had by then been opened about 0.5 mile SW of the "numerous small pits" and 0.25 mile E of the Old Brandywine Quarry.
(Watts, p. 158) Stone & Hughes assert that BSK&F originally opened the "Jones Pit", which was flooded when they visited in 1927.
BSK&F also owned land at Pilot and presumably quarried there.(Jordan, p. 726) I take this to be the "Worth Brothers Quarry", worked before 1913, of Singewald and Pearre & Heyl. [Also called the Caldwell Quarries - Mike Bertram] The latter also mention that the Bald Friar quarries shipped albite to the Brandywine Summit mill, and were worked for both talc and feldspar in later years.
In 1908, BSK&F were operating only in the westernmost pit at Brandywine Summit, the other 2 being flooded and out of use, quarrying orthoclase and microcline. (Bastin, p. 70) Watts (p. 148) says it was the largest feldspar quarry in the state, covering about 4 acres. Bastin visited in 1907 and reported that the Chatham quarry would soon have to switch from open pit to tunneling and would probably become uneconomical to operate. (Bastin, p. 65) This was indeed the case and the pit was flooded by 1916. (Watts, p. 153) By 1916, it appears that they had also shifted operations at Brandywine Summit; the main dike was worked out and they were opening a vein of graphic granite 300 yards *east* of the "main quarry".
Their feldspar mill at Brandywine Summit was destroyed in a fire on December 20, 1918 and was never rebuilt. (The Mineral Industry, v. 27 (for 1918), p. 241) Stone & Hughes are I think erroneous in dating this to 1920. This may explain why they only mention the three main pits and not the new vein of graphic granite; probably neither that opening nor the "New Brandywine Quarry" at Nottingham was worked for very long. The rail line was abandoned in 1922. (I don’t believe National Kaolin survived much beyond 1900.)
That’s pretty much all the history of Brandywine Summit Kaolin & Feldspar as I know it. Edward Worth survived the company and died in 1931. He owned the "Wawa" estate which gave its name to the locality and the dairy chain. His sons S(amuel), Harry, and George Edward were both associated with the feldspar and pottery business for a while but turned to other sources of feldspar (e.g., New York state) and other industries, like silver mining. There's very little left at the Elam quarries, where they built a development and camouflaged the flooded pits with trees. There's still a treeline where the rail line crossed route 202, if you know where to look by Old Ridge Village. I have looked around the area where the mill was located, and it's been completely obliterated and regraded, as best I can tell.
Looking at the reports of the time, both crude and ground feldspar were marketable (cf. Pearre & Heyl on the Keystone quarry), and were used in the making of pottery (high-grade) and glass (low-grade), in smaller quantities, when ground, for chicken feed, scouring soap, faux-granite facades, while very high-grade, picked feldspar was used in making false teeth. Because of this, I can't tell you whether the smaller quarries in the area would have had their output milled by one of the larger works (Brandywine Summit, Sparvetta, Toughkenamon) or sold it crude to be milled by the potters or pottery suppliers like Golding Sons. (This firm controlled a great deal of the pottery supply market in ground flint, spar, and clay; while they operated their own quarries and kaolin mines in the area, they presumably bought spar on the open market as well, and they had a feldspar mill in Wilmington from 1898 until it burned in 1924. This was off Christiana Ave., where the compost company you can smell from I-495 is now located.)
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