The Indiana Limestone Belt

Somewhere beneath a long arc of southern Indiana, from Monroe County down through Lawrence and Orange counties, lies one of the geological gifts that helped build America. The Salem Limestone formation, a pale, dense, even-grained oolitic limestone deposited in a shallow tropical sea roughly three hundred forty million years ago, sits close enough to the surface to quarry and thick enough to cut into enormous blocks. Indiana limestone, as the world came to call it, proved to be nearly perfect building material.

The stone is soft enough to carve in fine detail when first quarried but hardens on exposure to air. It resists fire and freeze-thaw cycles. It comes in consistent, workable beds.

And in the second half of the nineteenth century, as American cities began building in earnest, contractors discovered that the quarries around Bedford and Bloomington could supply it by the trainload. The list of structures faced in Indiana limestone reads like a tour of American civic ambition. The Empire State Building.

The Pentagon. The National Cathedral in Washington. The Chicago Tribune Tower.

Rockefeller Center. The Indiana state capitol in Indianapolis. The Field Museum.

Grand Central Terminal. The exterior of Yankee Stadium. By the nineteen twenties, a vast quantity of Indiana limestone had left these quarries.

The town of Bedford calls itself the Limestone Capital of the World, a title with reasonable claim. The quarry workers who cut and shaped the stone, mostly white working-class families, many of Scottish and English descent, some from families that had worked stone for generations, built a modest industry town around an extraordinary resource. The stone cut here is more recognizable worldwide than anything Indiana ever manufactured.