Roxbury "Puddingstone"

Roxbury "Puddingstone". Roxbury Heritage State Park. , More than 500 million years ago, as the continents drifted into their current locations, rocks from all over the world were deposited in the Boston Basin. Chunks of speckled granite, quartzite, and pink rhyolite mixed together. Then, deep underground, finer sand and minerals were squeezed and pressed between the larger pieces, forming a kind of natural cement. Later, over thousands of years, surface erosion exposed some of this conglomerate rock. When the first English settles found so many outcroppings or coke they named the town Rocksbury (rocks borough), and they called the rock "puddingstone.", ( photo captions ) , , With its lumpy texture, the bedrock under Roxbury looks like an old-fashioned, fruit-filled pudding. , , Building with Pudding(stone) All around Roxbury, in Copley Square, and beyond to Newton, you can find buildings built with Roxbury Puddingstone. It was once cut from Dudley Cliff, nearby on Malcolm X Boulevard, or Timothy McCarthy’s quarry on Parker Hill, across from Mission Church, shown at the right. , , Roxbury conglomerate is visible at nearby Horatio Harris Park. , , The Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury is located in the Abbotsford mansion. Constructed in 1872, it is built with puddingstone. , , When you polish Roxbury conglomerate, the variety of different broken rocks, or “clasts,” embedded in the mix become beautifully visible.