Dr. Allen Van Heyl, Jr., was a consummate economic
geologist, who served with the U.S. Geological
Survey (USGS) for nearly 50 years beginning in 1943.
He studied more of the nation’s mineral deposits than
most could begin to imagine. He developed a deep and
detailed knowledge of the nation’s geology and mineral
wealth and left a body of written work that will serve
science for decades to come – a remarkable legacy of
227 books and papers that he authored or co-authored.
Heyl majored in geology as an undergraduate at
Pennsylvania State University and earned his doctorate
in geology from Princeton University in 1943. Vision
problems made him ineligible for military service
in World World II, so he accepted a position with the
USGS, where he could serve in the nation’s vital minerals
exploration program. His first assignment (along with
colleague Allen Agnew), involved the resuscitation of
the moribund Upper Mississippi Valley lead-zinc district
of Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa. The team located the
4.5 Mt (5 million st) Bautsch deposit near Galena, IL
and other resources resulting in the recovery of mineral
wealth valued at more than $1 billion between 1943
and 1978. This work also resulted in 24 major reports
on Upper Mississippi-type deposits authored or coauthored
by Heyl and included additional exploration
in southeast Missouri; the tri-state district of southwest
Missouri, northeast Oklahoma and southeast Kansas;
Arkansas; central Tennessee and the Illinois-Kentucky
fluorspar district.
The 1950s brought Heyl new assignments coinciding
with a surge in national interest in nuclear power.
Field work in 1954 took him to the Bitter Creek carnotite
deposits of Montrose County, CO and, in 1956, he
examined the radioactive rare earth minerals of the Scrub
Oaks Mine in New Jersey and uraninite occurrences
near Peekskill, NY.
Also, beginning in 1954, Heyl’s expertise in the geology
of lead and zinc deposits took him to Leadville, CO,
where he investigated and interpreted the oxidized zones
of former sulfide-enriched orebodies. In the 1960s, he
published a series of reports that helped extend the life
of the Leadville district into the new millennium, when
Asarco closed the Black Cloud Mine.
During the same period, Heyl undertook the first
significant geological study of chromite and other mineralization
of the serpentine belt of Maryland, Pennsylvania
and Delaware. Simultaneously, he co-authored a
report, published by the Maryland Geological Survey
in 1965, on the copper, zinc, lead, iron, cobalt and barite
deposits of that state.
Other assignments took him to mining camps in
Hansonburg and Socorro, New Mexico, the Taylor District
and Great Basin regions of Nevada, Utah’s Tintic
District, the Eagle District of Colorado, California’s
Mojave District, the Viburnum Trend in Missouri and
many more.
Heyl’s career was both vocation and avocation. His
job was never just another day at the office, and it can
be truly said that his suitcase was rarely unpacked.
From Mining Engineering (July 2010, p. 40). Text and graphic courtesy of Mining Engineering.
The National Mining Hall of Fame
The 23rd Annual National Mining Hall of Fame Induction Banquet