Into the Earth

Into the Earth. Looking Back. , If you could dig down where you're standing, you would find marble. You can see chunks of it along the banks of the Otter Creek, where the first marble quarries in Middlebury were located. By the time the Marble Works was in operation, smaller quarries were being worked around town., Marble is a metamorphosed form of the sedimentary rock, limestone. In Vermont, it is found in a narrow band running in a north/south direction from the southern Champlain Valley through Proctor, near Rutland. It forms a rich base for agriculture as well as supplying some of the most beautiful white marble in the world., This photograph shows Quarry #5 of the pits that gave Middlebury's Quarry Road its name. The quarries were open pit operations, worked with simple hand tools. A small track carried a metal cart right up to where the men were taking out the stone. Much of the rock was crushed into different grades for agricultural use or paving., Text and photograph courtesy of the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History, Middlebury, Vermont