Farming with Dynamite: The Forgotten Stone Boom in Schoharie County, 1890-1905
For the first of the Schoharie County Historical Society’s 2023 lecture series, we will have author Dana Cudmore speaking on Schoharie County’s quarries in their heyday and what has happened to them since the downfall of their popularity. This event will be held at Lasell Hall on May 7 at 2pm.
The program documents how, in the decades before concrete, cut stone was used exclusively to create prestigious structures such as large churches, capitol buildings and others meant to stand for centuries. And in the final years of the 19th Century, Schoharie County quarries supplied millions of tons of it to help build New York. The Brooklyn Bridge, New York’s expanding barge canal system and other engineering marvels of the period created a huge demand for cut building stone from upstate (and elsewhere). The boom was short-lived. There were eight limestone quarries in the Town of Cobleskill alone, six in the village The largest, near Barnerville, employed nearly 450 men to fulfill a huge contract with the City of New York, worth about $65 million today.
These are not the quarries still working today. All have been abandoned. This presentation looks at some of the largest and catalogs the others, long forgotten. A question and answer session will follow. Signed copies of Underground Empires will be available to those attending.
