118 



Indiana University Studies 



presenting a peculiar appearance at first, will soon become uni- 

 form in color, and the fact that it was mixed stone will be difficult 

 for even a stone expert to determine. A building made entirely 

 of blue stone will slowly change to the same color as a building 

 of buff stone, so that the grading of the stone on this basis is 

 unnecessary if the trade were educatedto this fact. 



In the mills less waste occurs, but even here the amount 

 sometimes reaches as much as 20 per cent of the weight of the 

 quarry block purchased. Estimates by the different mill operators 

 place the amount all the way from 8 per cent up to 22 per cent, 

 but Mr. Ernest Hunter, then superintendent of the Oolitic stone 

 mill of Bloomington, gave me figures of actual weights of rough 

 stone shipped in and the sawed stone shipped out which show 

 that fully 20 per cent of the quarry block is wasted at the mill. 

 This percentage of waste increases with each additional operation 

 that the stone undergoes, and in the case of decorative work is 

 far greater than the above figure. This waste is greatest where 

 planer and lathe work is done and where the stone is turned out 

 as columns. 



Since a conservative estimate of the quarry waste would 

 be 40 per cent and of the mill waste 17 per cent, the part of the 

 stone finally reaching the building trade is about 50 per cent of 

 the solid cut. The 1912 Report on Mineral Resources of the 

 United States Geological Survey (p. 745) places the output of 

 the Southern Indiana quarry district at 10,442,304 cubic feet, 

 so that at the rate of waste given above the total waste of the 

 district must be close to 10,000,000 cubic feet of stone per year. 

 Of this vast waste-pile, at present about 18,000 cubic feet is 

 converted into crushed limestone and about 8,500 cubic feet is 

 made into lime. Allowing that as much more is sold for other 

 purposes, it will be readily seen that the present utilization of the 

 waste stone of the district amounts to nothing as compared to 

 the amount available. To this vast accumulation of any year 

 must be added the amount of waste that has accumulated during 

 the last twenty-five years of active operation of the quarries of 

 this locality. 



The present method of waste disposal is to dump it into 

 the old workings or give it to the railroads for hauling it away. 

 Such a large amount of waste has accumulated at some of the 

 quarries that the disposal of the present waste is a serious problem, 

 and in many cases waste-heaps of other years have to be moved so 

 that new floors may be opened. The present method is to pile 



