QUARRY MATERIALS OF NEW YORK i) 



foundations and occasionally for entire buildings, and there still 

 exist good examples of such work in many of the older com- 

 munities where they have stood for two centuries and more. 



The stone for the early masonry was seldom quarried from solid 

 ledges. Very little of it was cut or otherwise prepared, but it was 

 mostly laid as rubblework. Field stones were the kind mainly used, 

 as they were nearly everywhere abundant and the cheapest to secure, 

 and their removal from the land was desirable from an agricultural 

 standpoint. These stones, it may be remarked, are not indigenous 

 to the locality of their occurrence, but with the soil in which they 

 are found were transported from a more northerly latitude in the 

 sweep of the Laurentian ice sheet that finally extended over the 

 whole State. The bowlders consist of granite, gneiss, sandstone 

 and other rocks hard enough to resist the erosion of ice and water, 

 and of a durability tested by thousands of years exposure to the 

 weather. 



There seems no certainty as to the place or time of the first regular 

 quarry operations. Very likely the earliest work was somewhere 

 in the Hudson valley section, and the quarrying of limestone for the 

 manufacture of lime suggests itself as the object of the first steady 

 production of stone. Limestone was also required for the making 

 of iron which was established on a permanent basis in New York 

 State about 1751, when the Sterling furnace in Orange county was 

 built. At the beginning of the last century the manufacture of lime 

 had become an important industry in the Hudson River valley. 

 About 1820 the manufacture of natural cement was started in 

 Ulster and Onondaga counties, the basis of the industry being an 

 impure limestone which by calcination and grinding makes a high- 

 grade hydraulic cement. From the beginning New York State held 

 a prominent place in the cement industry; by 1840 Ulster county 

 alone was producing at the rate of 600,000 barrels a year, according 

 to Mather. The output of natural cement increased to over 4,000,- 

 000 barrels a year, but about the year 1900 it began to decline owing 

 to the cheapening of the cost of Portland cement. 



The construction of the Erie canal gave an impetus to the quarry- 

 ing of stone, since considerable quantities of dimension stone were 

 used in the canal locks. It also afforded means for the conveyance, 

 of stone from the central and western parts of the State to the 

 more thickly settled region in the east. Thus the Medina and 

 Onondaga building stones were made available. By 1840 there had 

 developed a considerable trade in flagstone which was obtained 

 from the same regions as now, that is, from Ulster, Sullivan, Dela- 



