Granite, Marble and Slate — a stop on Vermont Route 100.
Vermont's other great export, after syrup and cheese, came out of holes in the ground — and the evidence is in the buildings all around you.
Three stones, three regions. GRANITE from around Barre, east of this road: some of the finest monumental granite anywhere, and if you have ever seen a grey headstone in an American cemetery there is a fair chance it came from there. MARBLE from the valley west of the Green Mountains, around Proctor and Danby — Vermont marble faces buildings in Washington, including some very famous ones. And SLATE from the western border, in an unusual range of colours: purple, green, grey, red, which is why old New England roofs are patterned.
The quarry work drew immigrants — Italians, Scots, Spaniards, Irish — into towns that suddenly had opera houses, radical politics and a labour movement, in a state otherwise made of small farms. Barre had anarchists. It is not the Vermont of the postcards, and it is a large part of the real one.
It also killed people. Cutting stone dry throws silica dust, and silicosis took stonecutters young, for decades, before anybody forced a change. The cemeteries in the granite towns are full of beautifully carved stones over men who died in their thirties — carved, often, by the men who would die next.
Watch the foundations and steps of the old buildings as we pass. That is local stone, quarried by people who paid for it.