Exploring Verde Antique
Verde Antique (ancient green) is a type of serpentine (hydrous magnesium silicate) popular since ancient times as a decorative stone.
It is dull green, usually brecciated or mottled with white and lightergreen veins, and mixed with calcite, dolomite or magnesite. Sometimes it is erroneously called a variety of marble (“serpentine marble” or “Thessalian marble” reflecting the original ancient source location in Greece). Verde Antique is not marble and is not granite. Hardness ranges between 3 and 6 on the Mohs scale, and it is semi-translucent, with a greasy or waxy luster.
Verde Antique has been mined at the Verde Antique Marble Quarry, located in the Belleville Mining District, east of Victorville and south of Barstow, in San Bernardino County, California. Serpentine is California’s official state rock. Another source location in California, used by Native American people for ollas and mortars, is Potts Valley on Santa Catalina Island, in Los Angeles County. The serpentine marble quarries are located at the Empire Landing, a mile and a half inland (A California Verde Antique Quarry, Prof. Charles F. Holder, Scientific American, Dec. 1899). This type of serpentine is also referred to, again erroneously, as steatite or soapstone, which is a talk variety, and much softer than serpentine.
A dark green variety with whitish veins of Verde Antique serpentine is also mined at a quarry in Rochester in the Green Mountains in Addison County, Vermont, and is cut into large slabs and used today as countertops. Similar dark green ornamental Verde Antique was also mined at the Maryland Green Marble Corporation Quarry (Cardiff Serpentine Quarry), near Cardiff, in Harford County, Maryland, until the 1970s, and was also used mostly for countertops rather than gem material.