Early slate and schist quarrying

["George Graham" <georgergraham@zzzzzzzzzzz>]

Rick,

I've looked at a lot of old headstones in the western NY area. Most of them
are vermont marble that is very soft , crumbly and fragile. All of the
stones in the oldest sections are cut so the grain or should I say layers
run the length from top to bottom. I've always assumed that the early
quarrymen were very skilled in splitting slabs from large blocks. It would
have been before saws were used. People of that time used splitting
techniques on many different material, and it would be logical to think that
splitting stone would not be much different than wood. I guess that
quarrymen used wedges and hammers to pry apart sheets of marble. The wedges
would have been thin iron much like a wedge used to split firewood. I've
seen pictures of men working with wedges and sledgehammers in a quarry
someplace in africa not that long ago. I bet you could date the time when
saws were set up in stone cutting operation by looking for headstone that
have crosscut grain.

The earliest use of feather and wedge to split stone , I suspect goes way
way back in time. If I were looking for a place to start  breaking up a
large stone, I'd start with a natural crack or fissure, pound in some wooden
wedges, maybe soak them with water, let them swell up and keep at it until I
had a manageable stone.

I'm reminded of something I learned when I wandered into a monument shop in
South Carolina many years ago. The shop did a lot of georgia marble
monuments and markers. One of terms they used to describe a type of finish
was to give the marble a "sandtex" finish. That meant the stone was to be
lightly hit with a sandblaster to remove the saw marks that come from the
factory.  The oldest man working there told me that when he was a young man
they would hand finish all the marble by putting sand on the marble and then
rubbing a sledgehammer head all around. He said that the hammerhead was worn
way down by all the sandtexturing over many years. I would have loved to
have that old hammerhead.

I hope some of this helps. Maybe some of the real scholars on the list will
give us their imput.
George Graham