Flooded Quarry Pit and Miner's Shack, 1960s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Flooded Quarry Pit and Miner's Shack, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Flooded Quarry Pit and Miner's Shack, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-939CD1

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Someone built a shack at the bottom of this quarry with the same unexamined confidence people bring to any structure erected on top of a hole they are still digging. The rock face on the right has been cut back in clean diagonal slabs, the kind of geometry that only appears when a crew has been removing stone on schedule for years and assumes it will keep doing so indefinitely.

The pale turquoise pool at the base is not decorative. It is groundwater finding the lowest point of an excavation, which is what always happens once digging outpaces drainage, and which every quarry operator treats as next month's problem until it becomes this month's problem. The plank walkway and stacked timber beside the shack suggest men were still working around the water rather than because of it.

Nobody photographing a working quarry in the 1960s thought they were documenting an ending, but the picture reads like one anyway. The spoil heaps climbing both slopes are the visible receipt for whatever ore or stone justified the operation, and the forest crowding the rim above them was patiently waiting for the day the men and the shack were gone.

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