The miners who worked for Barton in the late 1800s used hand tools to extract garnet. They drilled holes in rock ledges which they filled with explosives. The blasts broke up the rock and miners chipped the waste away from the garnet.

The deposit was located high on the mountain, which made transporting the garnet difficult. To solve this problem, Barton had miners pick garnet in the summer. The garnet would be stored on the mountain until winter. Once snow arrived, the garnet chunks were loaded onto sleds and sent down the mountain to the railroad station! The ore was shipped to Philadelphia where it was crushed and made into sandpaper.

Roads, steam shovels, and hydraulic tools eventually replaced the sleds and hand tools. In 1924 the company built a mill at Gore Mountain. Garnet was mined, crushed, and graded on the same site.