WorldWide Drilling Resource

Mining in the USA Part 28: Vermont Compiled by Amy White Associate Editor WorldWide Drilling Resource ® With its rolling hills, rushing brooks, snowy glens, and red barns full of happy cows, Vermont is arguably one of the most charming states in the U.S. This scenario, however, only tells half of the story. Below this highly-prized, rolling green landscape, lies a gray core; and in fact, some of the most spectacular excavations in the country can be found in the Green Mountain State. Vermont is home to the largest granite quarries in America, making granite the most important mined product in the state. It’s been quarried since the 1820s in the town of Graniteville. The Rock of Ages company, which has been expanding throughout the U.S. and Canada since the early 1920s, owns most of Vermont’s operating granite quarries. The Smith Quarry owned by Rock of Ages is almost 600 feet deep, and is thought to be the largest operating deep-hole, dimension granite quarry in the world. In 2008, Smith Quarry went intergalactic when the opening scene for a Star Trek movie was filmed there. Marble is the only other stone, besides granite, cut dimensionally - not in gravel or granular form - from holes in the state. Today, only a few marble quarries remain active, one of which is the Danby Quarry, located inside Dorset Mountain. Danby is the largest underground marble quarry in the world. Danby has supplied stone to many prestigious architectural projects, including federal buildings in Washington, D.C., as well as the United Nations Building and Modern Museum of Art in New York. Stretching 20 miles along the border with New York, is the Slate Belt of Vermont. It is the longest slate-producing area in the nation. The Slate Belt peaked between 1850 and 1900, but it’s still sought after enough to keep over 300 people employed at roughly 25 quarries throughout the state. Vermont is still one of only six U.S. states supplying talc. All of Vermont’s talc comes from the Argonaut Mine in Ludlow. Surprisingly, before copper mining exploded out West, the largest copper mine in the U.S. was located in Vermont. The Elizabeth Mine in South Stafford operated for almost 150 years, pro- ducing nearly 50,000 tons of copper for the Civil War, theAmerican Industrial Revolution, two world wars, and the KoreanWar. It was the site of many tech- nological developments in theAmerican copper and chemical indus- tries before closing in 1958. Vermont’s mining industry still contributes roughly $69 million to the U.S. economy each year and directly em- ploys almost 3000 people in the state. Cloaked in green pastures and maple leaves, picturesque quarries speckling the countryside show Vermont to be a place people dig, in more ways than one. The Rock of Ages quarry in Barre, Vermont. The cut face shown here was used in the 2009 Star Trek movie. Photo by Mfwills. 28 NOVEMBER 2015 WorldWide Drilling Resource ®