This is a list of notable quarries and areas of quarrying in the United States. A number of these are historic quarries listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), ranging from relatively ancient archeological sites to places having pre-World War II activity. This includes major areas of continuing, modern quarrying.
According to Marble.com, in 2016 there were 276 quarries producing natural stone in 34 states, and states producing the most granite were Texas, Massachusetts, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Georgia. [1] The term "quarry" refers also to sites producing aggregate, molding sand, or other resources besides cut stone.
There were numerous more quarries in the U.S. during the 1800s and 1900s than are operational now. In Oregon, a state with much less activity than Vermont and other bigger quarrying states, there were more than 250 quarries operational at one time or another. In 1906 the state mineralogist of California reported on 52 granite quarrying areas in 17 counties. [2]
Many quarries were opened temporarily to provide stone for one or a few local or regional construction projects, but could not compete later when railroads allowed for economical transportation of heavy building materials to the area. Quarrying spurred the construction of railways and vice versa, from the 1826 construction of the Granite Railway in Massachusetts to the modern day.
Quarries in the United States, former and current, include:
Cochise Marble Company, Bowie, Arizona, on-site quarrying, blocks, aggregates, calcium carbonate 99.5%, established 1908 in the Chiricahua Mountains; colors: white, grey, black, blue
A quarry is a type of open-pit mine in which dimension stone, rock, construction aggregate, riprap, sand, gravel, or slate is excavated from the ground. The operation of quarries is regulated in some jurisdictions to manage their safety risks and reduce their environmental impact.
Catlinite, also called pipestone, is a type of argillite, usually brownish-red in color, which occurs in a matrix of Sioux Quartzite. Because it is fine-grained and easily worked, it is prized by Native Americans, primarily those of the Plains nations, for use in making ceremonial pipes, known as chanunpas or čhaŋnúŋpas in the Lakota language. Pipestone quarries are located and preserved in Pipestone National Monument outside Pipestone, Minnesota, in Pipestone County, Minnesota, and at the Pipestone River in Ontario, Canada.
Pipestone National Monument is located in southwestern Minnesota, just north of the city of Pipestone, Minnesota. It is located along the highways of U.S. Route 75, Minnesota State Highway 23 and Minnesota State Highway 30. The quarries are culturally significant to 23 tribal nations of North America. Those known to actually occupied the site chronologically are the Yankton Dakota, Iowa, and Omaha peoples. The Quarries were considered a neutral territory in the historic past where all tribal nations could quarry stone for ceremonial pipes. The catlinite, or "pipestone", is traditionally used to make ceremonial pipes. They are vitally important to Plains Indian traditional practices. Archeologists believe the site has been in use for over 3000 years with Minnesota pipestone having been found in ancient North American burial mounds across a large geographic area.
Brownstone is a brown Triassic–Jurassic sandstone that was historically a popular building material. The term is also used in the United States and Canada to refer to a townhouse clad in this or any other aesthetically similar material.
Chimney Rock can refer to one of the following sites in the United States and Canada:
Dimension stone is natural stone or rock that has been selected and finished to specific sizes or shapes. Color, texture and pattern, and surface finish of the stone are also normal requirements. Another important selection criterion is durability: the time measure of the ability of dimension stone to endure and to maintain its essential and distinctive characteristics of strength, resistance to decay, and appearance.
India possesses a wide spectrum of dimensional stones that include granite, marble, sandstone, limestone, slate, and quartzite, in various parts of the country.
The stone quarries of ancient Egypt once produced quality stone for the building of tombs and temples and for decorative monuments such as sarcophagi, stelae, and statues. These quarries are now recognised archaeological sites. Ancient quarry sites in the Nile valley accounted for much of the limestone and sandstone used as building stone for temples, monuments, and pyramids. Eighty percent of the ancient sites are located in the Nile valley; some of them have disappeared under the waters of Lake Nasser and some others were lost due to modern mining activity.
The Sioux Quartzite is a Proterozoic quartzite that is found in the region around the intersection of Minnesota, South Dakota, and Iowa, and correlates with other rock units throughout the upper midwestern and southwestern United States. It was formed by braided river deposits, and its correlative units are thought to possibly define a large sedimentary wedge that once covered the passive margin on the then-southern side of the North American craton. In human history, it provided the catlinite, or pipestone, that was used by the Plains Indians to carve ceremonial pipes. With the arrival of Europeans, it was heavily quarried for building stone, and was used in many prominent structures in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and shipped to construction sites around the Midwest. Sioux Quartzite has been and continues to be quarried in Jasper, Minnesota at the Jasper Stone Company and Quarry, which itself was posted to the National Register of Historic Places on January 5, 1978. Jasper, Minnesota contains many turn-of-the-century quartzite buildings, including the school, churches and several other public and private structures, mostly abandoned.
Piatra Tomii is a late Jurassic limestone outcrop forming a small hill near Răcătau village, Alba county, Romania. It is most well known for the Chalcolithic to Bronze Age flint mining settlement located on and near to the hill. The settlement is late Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age. The people who occupied this site belonged to the Coțofeni culture. The chief investigator of this archaeological site is Cristian Popa of the 1 Decembrie 1918 University, Alba Iulia. The artefact collection from this site are housed at the university in Alba Iulia. This site is significant as it is the first flint mine or quarry found so far in the Transylvanian basin. Petrographic analysis of the flint materials found at this site link it to artifacts found at prehistoric sites from throughout the Mures Valley leading researchers to believe that this site may have served an important role in the commerce of the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age. The large size of the settlement compared to its relative isolation high in the Apuseni Mountains tends to support this theory.
Coldspring is a quarrier and fabricator of granite and other natural stone and a bronze manufacturing company in the United States. Coldspring serves the memorials market, the design and architectural market and distributes slabs for the residential market, industrial products, raw quarry blocks, and diamond tools.
A ceremonial pipe is a particular type of smoking pipe, used by a number of cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Americas in their sacred ceremonies. Traditionally they are used to offer prayers in a religious ceremony, to make a ceremonial commitment, or to seal a covenant or treaty. The pipe ceremony may be a component of a larger ceremony, or held as a sacred ceremony in and of itself. Indigenous peoples of the Americas who use ceremonial pipes have names for them in each culture's Indigenous language. Not all cultures have pipe traditions, and there is no single word for all ceremonial pipes across the hundreds of diverse Native American languages.
The Lynch Quarry site, also known as the Lynch Knife River Flint Quarry, and designated by the Smithsonian trinomial 32DU526, is a historic pre-Columbian flint quarry located near Dunn Center, North Dakota, United States. The site was a major source of flint found at archaeological sites across North America, and it has been estimated that the material was mined there from 11,000 B.C. to A.D. 1600. The site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2011.
The Milwaukee Falls Lime Company is the former owner of a limestone quarry and lime kilns located in Grafton, Wisconsin. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. The quarry and kilns are now Lime Kiln Park, which also features a pavilion, playground, walking paths, sledding hill, horseshoe pits, and disc golf course.
The geology of Maine is part of the broader geology of New England and eastern North America.
The Grand Meadow Quarry Archeological District (21MW8) in Mower County, Minnesota, United States, is an Indigenous historic district that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994. The principal site within the District is the Grand Meadow Chert Quarry (GMCQ), originally a sprawling landscape of an estimated 2,000 pits dug over many centuries using handheld tools to reach a layer of high-quality gray chert. Even though the District is now predominantly obscured by plowed farmland and roadways, a pristine 8-acre remnant of the original 170-acre chert quarry still exists in a small woods, alongside 7 acres of restored prairie and grassland. That 15-acre portion of the quarry site, purchased by The Archaeological Conservancy (TAC) in 1994, is separately known as "The Grand Meadow Chert Quarry Archaeological and Cultural Preserve."
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