Marble and Granite, Vermont Underfoot

Stand almost anywhere in Vermont and you are standing on geology that built the country's public monuments. The Green Mountains are among the oldest mountain ranges in North America, worn smooth over hundreds of millions of years, and what they left behind in their valleys and hillsides is some of the finest building stone in the world.

The marble runs in a band down the western side of the state, through the valley towns of Proctor and West Rutland and Dorset. Vermont marble is a metamorphic limestone, recrystallized under heat and pressure into a material dense enough to take a polish and pale enough to glow in the right light. The quarries at Proctor, operated by the Vermont Marble Company, supplied the stone for the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington and the main post offices of dozens of American cities. At the peak of the industry in the early nineteen hundreds, Proctor was shipping marble to construction sites on three continents. The town's entire economy organized itself around the quarry. The company owned the workers' housing, the company store, and the local hospital.

Granite is a different story and a different part of the state. The quarries around Barre, in central Vermont, produce some of the hardest granite in the world, a dark blue-gray stone so dense and uniformly textured that it became the preferred material for cemetery monuments across the United States. By nineteen hundred, Barre was the granite capital of the world, with dozens of quarries operating in the hills above town and hundreds of skilled carvers, many of them Italian and Scottish immigrants, working in sheds along the valley floor. The Rock of Ages quarry outside Barre is still active. It is the largest deep-hole granite quarry in the world, cutting down more than five hundred feet from the surface.

The stone industry drew immigrant labor from Italy, Scotland, Finland, and Spain, each community bringing its own carving traditions to the gray hillsides of central Vermont. Many of those carvers eventually died of silicosis, the lung disease caused by inhaling granite dust, which the industry was slow to acknowledge and slower still to address. The monuments they shaped for other people's graves outlasted them by centuries.