Bucyrus-Erie Dragline at a Limestone Quarry, 1960s

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Bucyrus-Erie Dragline at a Limestone Quarry, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Bucyrus-Erie Dragline at a Limestone Quarry, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-03BF57

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Someone stood at the rim of an open quarry and photographed the machine doing the work, which was the whole point of quarries in the 1960s: not the rock, but the certainty that more rock was always coming. The Bucyrus-Erie nameplate on the dragline's boom was not vanity signage. It was the equivalent of a brand name stitched into a workman's coat, there because the company that built draglines wanted every quarry in America to know whose steel was moving their overburden.

The stripped bench of pale limestone and the standing pool of iron-stained water below it are the ordinary residue of extraction, the kind of scene nobody photographed for its beauty and everybody photographed anyway, usually for an insurance file or a company report. The tree line beyond marks where the quarry's permit, or somebody's patience, ran out. Whoever operated that dragline assumed the rock would outlast the machine; usually it did not work out that way.

The raw slabs in the foreground, sheared along the same bedding plane, testify to blasting done with more confidence than precision, a habit of the era when explosives were cheaper than careful engineering. Nobody in 1960s quarry management was thinking about reclamation law, because there mostly wasn't any yet. That flooded pit was simply tomorrow's problem, photographed today.

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