■ m, STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
At Hanchettville, the lower Magnesian limestone has been 
' opened in Hanchett’s quarry, on section 16, and furnishes 
some very good stone. Along the valleys of the Black Earth 
and Wisconsin, west of Madison, are exhaustless stores of 
good building stone. 
PRAIRIE DU CHIEN. 
The stone used in building the new capitol at Madison is 
obtained at Prairie du Chien. It resembles the Madison stone 
in texture, but is lighter colored. At McDowell’s quarry in 
the bluffs near the city, it occurs in thick strata of light grey 
color, even texture, weathering smoothly, with sharp angles, 
and gives every evidence of durability. It works easily like 
the Madison stone, hut contains rather more lime, and is free 
from iron. Blocks of almost any size required for Architec¬ 
tural purposes can be obtained. If our capitol edifice is fin¬ 
ished with this stone in the same style as it has been begun, 
it will equal in beauty that of any State' in the Union. This 
stone must eventually come into considerable demand, as 
nothing has yet been found superior to it in the North-west, 
unless it be the white limestone of Chicago. At LaCrosse, a 
stone somewhat similar is quarried in the bluffs, but it is infe¬ 
rior in color and texture. 'At Montcllo, Marquette County, 
the Potsdam sandstone has been quarried. It is usually soft 
and crumbling, but a bed here is quite hard, weathering with 
sharp corners and nearly white. It dresses well when freshly 
quarried, and hardens by exposure. Four miles east of Fort 
Winnebago, a similar sandstone is quarried, in a long ridge 
running north-east and south-west, rising some one hundred 
feet or so south of the road to Marcellon. The strata are 
distinct, from two to three feet thick, furnishing blocks of 
large dimensions. It is a fine-grained, sharp grit, with occa¬ 
sional patches which appear to be vitrified, but usually of a 
'very even texture, showing cross lines of deposition; some 
fifty or sixty feet are exposed here, the upper part very fossil- 
iferous, among which the spines of trilobites are visible. 
Considerable stone has been taken from this quarry to Portage 
