Cockeysville: The Marble in the Washington Monument

The marble in the lower one hundred and fifty-two feet of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. came from here. Cockeysville marble is a dolomitic stone that began as limestone on an ancient sea floor hundreds of millions of years ago, then was transformed by heat and pressure into white metamorphic rock during the continental collisions that built the Appalachians. It has been quarried for generations.

The Beaver Dam Quarry supplied the upper part of that monument in the eighteen eighties. During the nineteenth century, Cockeysville marble went into some of the most prominent structures in the country: the Baltimore City Hall and portions of the United States Capitol Building. The town of Cockeysville grew up around the quarrying trade and the railroad that served it. The quarries are now closed and water-filled, but the stone they cut is still visible in the monuments that used it.