Mine Hill, Roxbury

Granite off this hill went into the Brooklyn Bridge and Grand Central Terminal.

Mine Hill and its minerals have been bound up with Roxbury, Connecticut since the middle of the 18th century. A silver mine was opened here, and was afterwards found to hold spathic iron, which turned out to be particularly well suited to making steel, so a small smelting furnace was built. The granite lying about in Mine Hill's quarries supplied the building material for the ore roaster and the blast furnace, and then went on to considerably larger work in New York City.

The US Geological Survey lists the Roxbury Iron Mine as a past producer of iron, with copper, lead and silver as secondary commodities, and dates the prospecting to 1750. The Roxbury Iron Mine and Furnace Complex is one of three places in the town on the National Register of Historic Places, along with Roxbury Center and the Roxbury Station Historic District.

The town is quiet now and was never large. Roxbury had 2,260 people at the 2020 census. Its Native name was Shepaug, a Mahican word meaning rocky water, and it was settled around 1713 as a parish of Woodbury, which in practice meant the local household tax supported the Roxbury puritan church rather than the one at Woodbury. It incorporated as a town in its own right in October 1796, about a decade after the Revolution ended. The name is either simple description or was carried over from Roxbury, Massachusetts.

It sits in a well-connected corner of Litchfield County, 65 miles northeast of New York City, 16 miles northeast of Danbury and the same distance west of Waterbury, covering 26.4 square miles of which almost none is water. The village names are worth the drive on their own: Judd's Bridge, Roxbury Center, Roxbury Falls and Roxbury Station.

PUBLIC preserve; the mine openings are gated for bat protection and safety, so admire them from outside.