Middlebury Marble Town

Middlebury Marble Town. The Hollowing of Frog Hollow. , Mill Street, on the opposite bank, has run through Frog Hollow since the early days, but the "hollows" were not created until tons of beautiful gray-veined white marble were quarried from here. Starting in 1802, long before the Marble Works were established on this side of the Creek, Eben Judd and Lebbeus Harris ran Vermont's first large-scale marble business on the south bank. A 10-year-old engineering genius named Isaac Markham came to Mr. Judd and showed him a model he had made of how marble might be cooled down with water from the Creek as it was cut, saving precious saw blades. His invention revolutionized the industry. Until 1837, Judd's factory sawed up to 10,000 square feet of marble a year, most of it quarried in Frog Hollow. The marble tombstones, lintels, sills, mantels and more were shipped north to Montréal and as far south as Georgia. You can still see marble all along the riverbank., ( photo captions ) , (top photo) , Judd-Harris House (1829), ca. 1955, Eben Judd and his son-in-law, Lebbeus Harris, built this stately home on a hill overlooking their marble operation in 1829. The facade of the Judd-Harris House (now the Henry Sheldon Museum) features six Ionic pillars fashioned on-site from Middlebury marble. , Collection of the Henry Sheldon Museum of Natural History, Middlebury, Vermont., (bottom photo) , Water-haulers, ca. 1900, Middlebury Falls remained a center of industrial enterprise into the early twentieth-century. This photo shows a group of men using a horse to pull water-hauling equipment past the old mills in Frog Hollow, on the riverbank opposite the spot where you are standing. , Collection of the Henry Sheldon Museum of Natural History, Middlebury, Vermont.