I found this monster tapered columbite crystal digging in the dump piles of the #2 Case Beryl Prospect in the Summer of 2013. Somebody must have missed it digging many, many years before me because there was an old tin can buried about a foot beneath it. I was told by a longtime Connecticut collector that this was the nicest columbite crystal he had ever seen in person in his 40 years of digging in the state. It weighs a little under a quarter pound!

I also included a picture of a columbite in matrix I dug at the Simpson Quarry a few miles away in South Glastonbury a few years later. What's cool is that it has the exact same crystal habit as the much larger columbite but it is only about 1/8" across.