Hummelstown Brownstone: The Stone That Built Gilded Age America

Near here, from eighteen sixty-three to nineteen twenty-nine, quarrymen cut a distinctive reddish-brown sandstone that helped define the look of Victorian and Gilded Age America. The Hummelstown Brownstone Company, built up under Allen Walton, employed immigrant skilled stone-cutters and shipped its product across the nation as a preferred masonry material of builders.

Brownstone buildings in cities across the country owe their signature facades in part to quarries like this one. Hummelstown stone was prized for its warm color and workability. For more than six decades it supplied architects and builders coast to coast. When architectural fashions shifted toward brick and concrete in the early twentieth century, the quarry fell quiet. The cuts in the hillside are all that remain of an industry that literally shaped the streetscapes of American cities.