Spruce Pine
North Carolina
Spruce Pine looks like an ordinary small mountain town in Mitchell County, but it sits on top of one of the most strategically critical mineral deposits in the world. The mountains around it formed three hundred eighty million years ago when Africa collided with North America, and that violent process produced quartz of almost unimaginable purity. Today, the mines around Spruce Pine supply an estimated seventy to ninety percent of the high-purity quartz used to manufacture semiconductor chips worldwide.
Every smartphone, every data center, every solar panel made with silicon wafers depends in some way on stone pulled from these ridges. The mining history here goes back much further: Indigenous peoples extracted mica from these hills two thousand years ago, using it as currency and for ceremonial purposes. Commercial mica operations began in the eighteen fifties, and by the eighteen nineties Spruce Pine was a national center of mica production.
The quartz now inside your devices was, until recently, considered industrial waste.
