Mercuryville, California Mercuryville, California Mercuryville, California is a ghost town in the Mayacamas Mountains along The Geysers road. Mercuryville was founded in 1874, after cinnabar, a mercury bearing ore, was discovered in eastern Sonoma County around 1870. Mercury is a dense liquid metal that can be used to separate gold from other less dense materials and the California Gold Rush, which had begun only 20 years earlier, increased the demand and price of mercury to $1 a pound, making extracting the ore profitable, and prompting a short-lived mercury rush in the 1870s. When the price of ore dropped within a few years,
Cinnabar any mineral. Its mean refractive index is 3.08 (sodium light wavelengths), versus the indices for diamond and the non-mineral gallium(III) arsenide (GaAs), which are 2.42 and 3.93, respectively. The hardness of cinnabar is 2.0–2.5 on the Mohs scale, and its specific gravity 8.1. Structurally, cinnabar belongs to the trigonal crystal system. It occurs as thick tabular or slender prismatic crystals or as granular to massive incrustations. Crystal twinning occurs as simple contact twins. Note, mercury(II) sulfide, HgS, adopts the cinnabar structure described, and one additional structure, i.e. it is dimorphous. Cinnabar is the more stable form, and is a structure