Quartz, silicon dioxide (SiO2) is one of the most common minerals in the Earth's crust, and occurrences of massive quartz (so-called "bull quartz," in miners' jargon) are common. They are distinctive, the white quartz typically standing out prominently from the background of ordinary rock, and bull quartz also sometimes hosts valuable mineral deposits. The gold in the hard-rock mines of the Mother Lode on the west slope of the Sierra Nevada, for example, typically occurs in quartz.
So, when this large quartz deposit was discovered not long after the Gold Rush, the prospectors thought they'd discovered a bonanza, and the town of Crystal was laid out in 1864. However, the quartz proved to be barren. For a couple of years, a sawmill in Crystal cut timber for the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad a few miles south, but after the railroad bypassed the settlement, Crystal rapidly withered. Most people and businesses relocated to the new railroad town of Verdi, in Nevada, just east of the California state line.
During World War II, some quartz for high-performance electronics was quarried, but the quarry has since reverted to public land now administered by the US Forest Service.
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