Our Quarry's History
We work an old Maryland slate quarry in the Peach Bottom slate region, and every piece we sell carries a little of its story.
Where American Slate Roofs Began
Around 1734, two Welsh pioneer farmers, William and James Rees, found slate in the Peach Bottom hills and used it to roof their own buildings. It was the first use of native roofing slate in America, and some of those slates are still sound after more than 260 years.
Around 1785 the first true quarry opened here, the first commercial slate quarry in the United States. Slate is heavy and roads were few, so those early years were a struggle. In 1840 the Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal opened, and Peach Bottom slate finally reached new markets.
Quarrymen with the slate bank, c. 1895
In 1845 the first Welsh "slaters" arrived. Soon hundreds of workers, most of them from Wales, were working as many as twenty quarries. In 1851 Rowland Parry of Peach Bottom exhibited the slate at London's Crystal Palace Exhibition, where it won first prize as the finest roofing slate then known.
Made by Time, Split by Hand
Slate began as mud on the floor of an inland sea. Over hundreds of millions of years it was pressed and hardened, and Peach Bottom slate took its form in the Ordovician period, about 500 million years ago. That long squeeze gave it its "cleavage," the grain that lets it split into thin, even layers.
Slate splitters, c. 1930s
No machine has ever replaced the splitter. Splitters were the best-paid workers, the "aristocrats" of the quarry. They worked in teams of two called a "block": one split the slate and the other trimmed it to size, which was called "dressing." In 1880 they earned $1.50 to $2.00 a day. Today it's a dying art, and very few slate splitters are left in the United States.
Our Quarry Today
Our quarry was worked until about the 1920s and then abandoned. The pit slowly filled with water, and today it's a quiet quarry pond of about 3 acres that we care for. The old roofers kept only about the top 20% of the slate for roofing tiles and left the other 80% in mountains of rubble piles. That's the slate we work with now.
We bring it in by wheelbarrow, split it by hand with a hammer and chisel the way the old splitters did, and finish each piece on the saw. Every steppingstone, slab, mosaic rod and chip we make comes from that history.