BUILDING AND ORNAMENTAL STONES. 523 



quarried at Mount Desert, in the same State ; Lyme and Stony Creek, 

 Connecticut ; Westerly, Rhode Island ; and Graniteville, Missouri. 

 The Calais rock, which is at present the most important of these, is 

 a light pink in color, of medium coarseness of texture, and acquires 

 beautiful surface and polish. It is used extensively for door-posts and 

 the bases of monuments in all our principal cities, competing favorably 

 with the coarser red granite from Peterhead, Scotland, or that from 

 St. George, New Brunswick. 



Black granites are quarried in but two, and these widely separated, 

 localities St. George, Maine, and Penryn, California. Both stones 

 are fine-grained, and nearly black on a polished surface, their dark 

 colors being due to the abundance of black mica and hornblende that 

 they contain. The greater part of the rock quarried and put upon the 

 market under this name is, however, not granite at all, but diabase, a 

 rock differing from granite in containing neither quartz, orthoclase, 

 nor mica, but composed mainly of a triclinic feldspar and augite. The 

 principal quarries of this rock are at Addison, Maine ; Medford and 

 Somerville, Massachusetts ; York, Pennsylvania ; and near Jersey City, 

 New Jersey. 



These rocks are all fine-grained and hard, and of a dark-gray color, 

 that from Addison being nearly black when polished. The colors are 

 rather too somber for general building purposes, but, when properly 

 combined with brick or lighter stone, the effect is admirable. The 

 Addison rock is being used to a considerable extent for cemetery and 

 other monumental work, for which it seems peculiarly adapted, and 

 together with the York diabase has been used in the stone- work of the 

 Capitol-grounds at Washington. Diabase from the near vicinity has 

 been used in the construction of the Stevens Institute building at Ho- 

 boken, New Jersey, and the court-house and St. Patrick's Cathedral at 

 Jersey City. The fronts of many private and business houses in the 

 last-named city are also of diabase, but the effect is not good, owing 

 to the somber colors already alluded to. 



From the fact that Maine and Massachusetts lead in the granite- 

 quarrying industry, it does not necessarily follow that these States pro- 

 duce a greater variety or better quality of material than some others 

 in which the annual product is far less. The supremacy is due rather 

 to natural quarrying and transportation facilities. In Maine especial- 

 ly many of the quarries are situated on hill-sides close by the water's 

 edge, where no artificial drainage is required, and but little carting of 

 the stone is necessary prior to loading it upon vessels, by means of 

 which transportation can be had to all the leading cities of the country 

 without transhipment, an item of no small importance with material 

 so bulky and heavy as stone. Added to this is the fact that the great 

 glacial ice-sheet, that once plowed its way across the whole of New 

 England, has entirely removed the overlying mass of decayed rock 

 and other waste material, and left the fresh granite close to the sur- 



