The Marble Hills
Near Great Barrington, Massachusetts
The hills around Great Barrington hold a hidden treasure, a belt of gleaming marble and limestone that shaped the region's economy for generations. Hundreds of millions of years ago, ancient seabeds of limestone were buried, heated, and squeezed by colliding continents until they transformed into hard, crystalline marble. Quarries opened across southern Berkshire County, in towns like Sheffield, Lee, and West Stockbridge, and the stone they produced was prized across the country.
Berkshire marble helped build some of the nation's landmarks, including parts of the Washington Monument, Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York, and grand public buildings up and down the East Coast. Closer to home, the marble found its most extravagant use right here in Great Barrington. When the widow of railroad baron Mark Hopkins built her enormous castle here in town, it was faced in blue dolomite rather than marble, a reminder that the local stone belt ran in several colors.
Alongside the marble, lime burning was an important early industry, producing the material used in mortar and plaster and to sweeten farm soil. Today the old quarry pits are mostly quiet, some flooded into ponds, a few reborn as art parks, quiet reminders of the stone that once made these hills famous.
