Qualla: Kings Mountain Mine

Kings Mountain Mine: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The rock under Kings Mountain is older than almost anything you can think of. Rubidium-strontium dating on the spodumene pegmatites returns a Mississippian-period emplacement age of 340 million years, give or take five. Within those pegmatites sits one of the largest bedrock lithium deposits in the United States, a resource that the twenty-first century has decided it cannot do without. The mine that sits on top of that deposit has been opened, closed, sold, sold again, and is now being reopened by the Albemarle Corporation to feed the batteries of an electrified economy.

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Kings Mountain Mine: The Carolina Tin Belt

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Gold was discovered in the Kings Mountain area sometime after 1834. The Kings Mountain Gold Mine operated intermittently into the early 1900s and then closed. In 1880, prospectors found cassiterite, an ore of tin, in the pegmatites that ran in a twenty-mile-wide, hundred-and-ten-...

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Kings Mountain Mine: The War Came for the Lithium

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Solvay Process Company opened a flotation plant at Kings Mountain in May 1942 to produce spodumene concentrate from the ore. The mine ran for thirty-three months until February 1945. The plant could handle 300 short tons of ore per day, but the total production over the war y...

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Kings Mountain Mine: The Corporate Lineage

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mining concerns trade like commodities themselves. Cyprus Amax bought Foote Mineral in 1996, and with it Kings Mountain. In 1998 Cyprus Amax sold both to Chemetall GmbH, a subsidiary of Metallgesellschaft, which was part of the Dynamit Nobel Group. Rockwood Lithium acquired the m...

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Kings Mountain Mine: The Geology Itself

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The spodumene-bearing pegmatite dikes occupy a sliver of amphibolite, 2.8 miles long and a quarter-mile wide, oriented northeast-southwest. The amphibolite is fine-grained, dark gray to greenish black, layered with talc-silicate minerals and calcite and threaded with chloritic bi...

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Kings Mountain Mine: The Electric Future

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lithium-ion batteries power electric vehicles, grid storage, phones, laptops, drones, and an expanding list of military and medical devices. The United States, having let most of its battery-grade lithium production migrate offshore, has spent the past several years scrambling to...

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