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Lawrence County is the Limestone Capital of the World!
Indiana Limestone has been used as a building material for nearly 200 years
GLimestone, for centuries buried beneath the hills of southern Indiana began being used as a building stone in the mid-1800s. The naturally occuring product, is quarried in the Lawrence County area and shipped around the nation for use in some of the finest buildings in the world. This product is known by several names: Indiana or Bedford Stone – for marketing purposes; Salem – for its geological formation; and Oolitic – for its composition. The town of Oolitic is named for this material which is made up of “Oolites”.
The area of production is known as the “Stone Belt” This belt begins in the north in Putnam County and makes its way southward through Owen, Monroe, Lawrence, Washington, Orange, and Crawford Counties in the central portion of southern Indiana.
Historian, E.Y. Gernsey, believed that the first use of Indiana limestone was lintels of the old Bullett Mill in Spring Mill State Park, erected east of what is now Mitchell about 1816 and the foundation of the Dr. Winthrope Foote home, site of the old Greystone Hotel, on the square in downtown Bedford. Stone Indiana was first used for foundations and window sills. In the early years, Americans did not use stone as a building material since there was a need to clear the land, therefore, they chopped trees to build their homes. In England, field stone was used in construction. Clay was available in most areas for brick. In some places where there was stone, there was no lime for mortar.
 The first person to realize the value of the stone in Lawrence County was Dr. Winthrope Foote, a native of Connecticut, born in 1787. He came to Lawrence County in 1816 and located at Palestine near White River. He later moved to Bedford when the people abandoned Palestine. He once predicted that limestone from the “Blue Hole” would someday be shipped to New York and all over the world. This prediction was before the railroad came as a means for transporting the stone. Although stone is shipped all over the world, the east is still the strongest market. A good example of early stone work is Dr. Foote’s Tomb, a vault carved out of a huge bolder. This tomb can be seen off of 16th Street on Bedford’s east side.
Limestone became popular as a building product just after the big Chicago fire of 1871. The buildings that were made of limestone were still standing after the fire, so when reconstruction began, limestone was used for a large number of the buildings.
The years before 1884 were indeed a pioneering era of Indiana limestone. In those early days, work was crude to the extreme and production was limited. Almost everything marketed in the first years was hand produced and the market was almost all local. Stone was “quarried’ by blasting it out of a bluff with black powder. Three or four inch diameter powder holes were drilled by hand, going as deep as 20ft., with long iron drills. Later, as a “ledge” was beginning to take shape, drillers placed holes in rows, filled them with black powder and “blasted” a cut. A couple of blasts might last a small mill a year.
In 1863, G.J. Wardwell, a New Englander, invented a channel cutting machine the device was soon introduced to local quarries. There were 21 quarries in the district and about 600 men employed in Bedford. Soon after, hand operations throughout the industry ended. Better power driven, automatic machinery, lightened and enriched the laboring mans’ life. Steam channelers, steam derricks, steam drills and pumps came into existence.
The great depression, more than any other incident, hurt the stone industry most. The use of steel, a less expensive item than the huge limestone blocks, dealt quite a blow.
 So called blue stone was most valuable and highly prized in those early days and stone with a blue cast was quarried in preference to other shades. The famous Biltmore Mansion in North Carolina is an example of the blue stone, quarried from the Dark Hole Quarry. In today’s market, the buff color is most desirable. Wire saws came into use in the 1890’s. The wire was not tough enough to stand under abrasive action and tension could not be maintained to make true and even cuts. By World War II, they were an uncommon sight and now the modern diamond saws are used to cut stone.
John R. Rowe’s Monumental Works was operated in 1897 and his company specialized in “rustic” stone carvings – sculpturing trees, logs, etc.., complete with bark, rings and limbs for garden and grave monuments. He supplied some 15 monuments for the Chicamauga Battleground Memorial near Chattanooga, TN. He entered into partnership with Ferdinand O. Cross of Chicago. It was Cross and Rowe who were said to have entered carvings in the 1883 World’s Fair at Chicago. Thus, carvings became popular. Examples of rustic tree trunk carvings and other art carvings can be found in local cemeteries and yard ornaments.
All mills in the district had their own cutters and carvers – cut stone workers, men who transformed quarried stone into architectural ornament and statuary. A cutter cuts two-dimensional ornament and a carver is one who sculptures ornate three-dimensional objects.
Some of the most famous buildings constructed with Indiana limestone are as follows; The Empire State Building in New York, the Tribune Tower in Chicago, the Pentagon and the National Cathedral in Washington D.C.. Thirty-five of the state capitol buildings are made of Indiana limestone and a varied number of other famous buildings throughout the country. Limestone has made a comeback from depression times and it’s recognized as a long lasting, durable product.
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