BUILDING AND ORNAMENTAL STONES. 381 



Two excellent varieties of colored marbles occur at Plattsburgh and 

 Chazy, in Clinton County, in this State, and which are commercially 

 known as u Lepanto n * and French gray. The first consists of a close, 

 fine-grained gray groundmass with pink and white fossil remains, which 

 are evidently crinoidal. The second is more uniformly gray and bears 

 larger fossils. It is an excellent stone and, with perhaps the exception 

 of the Tennessee marbles, has been used more extensively for mantels, 

 table tops, tiling, and general interior decorative work than any other 

 of oar marbles. 



At Glens Falls, on the Hudson Eiver, occurs an extensive deposit of 

 dark blue-black magnesian limestone, certain strata of which furnish the 

 finest varieties of black marble at present quarried in this country. The 

 stone is very fine grained and compact, and, when polished, of a deep, 

 lustrous black color, though the uniformity of the surface is sometimes 

 broken by the presence of a small white fossil. A two-foot cube of this 

 stone is in the Museum collections. The finest quality of this marble 

 occurs in a single stratum some 12 feet in thickness. The poorer quali- 

 ties are burned for lime, of which they furnish material of exceptional 

 purity. Black marble is also quarried to some extent at Willsborough, 

 in Essex County. At Port Henry, in this same county, there is quarried 

 a green and white speckled marble, composed of an intimate mixture of 

 serpentine, calcite, and dolomite that has been used for interior deco- 

 rative work. This stone has been noticed more fully under the head 

 of serpentine. 



At Lockport there is extensively quarried a soft gray crinoidal lime- 

 stone in which the fossils are frequently of a pink or bluish opalescent 

 color. It is used to some extent for mantels and other ornamental pur- 

 poses.t 



In the town of Warwick, in Orange County, there is found a beautiful, 

 coarsely crystalline marble of a carmine-red color, sometimes slightly 

 mottled or veined with white. But little of it has been used and the 

 supply is reported as small. 



North Carolina. — Although no quarries of marble are at the present 

 time worked to any extent in this State, there occur within its limits 

 numerous deposits of most excellent material that only require enter- 

 prise and capital to bring to a ready market. One of the most impor- 

 tant of these is near Ked Marble Gap, in Macon County. The rock is 

 a beautiful bright flesh pink, sometimes blotched or striped with blue 

 and yellow. The texture is fine and even, and it acquires an excellent 

 surface and polish. The stone is stated by Professor Kerr to occur in 

 the side of the mountain in cliffs 150 feet or more in height, and blocks 

 of almost any size can be obtained. It is quite different from any- 



* The Lepanto marble is figured on PI. xxxn of the census report, where it is 

 wrongly set down as from Isle La Motte, Vermont. 



t J. S. Newberry in report on building and ornamental stones, Vol. in Inter. Ex. 

 Reports, p. 158. 



