Stone Quarry Terraces with Derrick Crane, 1960s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Stone Quarry Terraces with Derrick Crane, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Stone Quarry Terraces with Derrick Crane, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-562512

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Somebody in the 1960s looked at a hillside and decided the correct response was to remove it, one rectangular block at a time. The terraced walls of this quarry are the result of that decision, cut in the confident, patient manner of men who assumed the rock would always need cutting and the crane would always need running.

A wisp of smoke drifts up from a blasting charge or a steam channeler doing the slow work of separating stone from mountain, while a wooden ladder leans against a lower ledge as if someone just stepped away for lunch. The derrick crane on the ridge line was, for its era, the whole point of the operation: without it, a slab of granite or sandstone this size was just an expensive rock nobody could move.

Down in the pit, a stray tire and a scatter of tools sit where they were left, evidence that quarrying in this period ran on internal combustion and improvisation in roughly equal parts. Nobody in the picture is posing for it, which is its own kind of honesty â€” this was simply what a working day looked like before diamond wire saws made the whole scene obsolete.

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