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Swindle in Swanton, VT

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(page 8 of 8)

Farther down Route 7, there's a natural spring near the old Bullard's Tavern (now a private home), where George Barney, a prosperous local entrepreneur, stopped to water his horse one day in 1870 as he returned home from a speech to businessmen in St. Albans. He was the founder of the original Barney Marble Company and operated other quarries that produced black, green, and gray marble, as well as the bustling mill on the Missisquoi. That day while his horse drank, Barney looked down on the ground and noticed some alluring red rocks. He picked up some samples and analyzed them in his lab. Then he bought the land and opened the quarry that would supply the fabled Swanton Red.

Thompson turns onto a dirt road, unlocks a metal gate, and drives carefully through a narrow tunnel beneath I-89. The road climbs past bogs, cow pastures, and scrubby fields, rising above the wintry mist and curving up to the top of a forested ridge.

Great slabs of marble, streaked red and white, thrust up from the earth, veined and timeless. You can pick chunks of it off the ground. It's heavy in your hand, a product of the forces that shaped it -- the stuff that dreams are made of.

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Here are some resources to help you avoid scams.

A Half-Billion Years in the Making

Conflict is nothing new to Swanton Red marble, as the rock itself was born of a cataclysmic continental collision. Five hundred million years ago, western Vermont lay beneath a shallow inland sea where billions of generations of tiny marine creatures lived and died, littering the ocean floor with their chalky shells. The shells eventually became compressed into a 30- to 120-foot-thick layer of limestone-like rock called dolomite, which today is part of the Dunham Formation.

Fifty million years later, the continents of Africa and North America converged, subjecting the rocks of the Champlain Valley to intense heat and pressure that metamorphosed shale into slate, limestone into calcite marble, and dolomite into dolomitic marble -- some of which was colored red by iron impurities.

This slow-motion continental impact also thrust up immense slices of crust, like so many tilted dominoes, along a series of faults that run the length of Vermont. One of the most famous of these, the Champlain Thrust Fault, heaved the Dunham dolomite up from a depth of 1.5 miles and drove it 50 miles west, where it came to rest above much younger rocks. There it would lie, awaiting the quarrier's saw and the sculptor's chisel to alter it once again, this time into a highly polished floor tile or mantel -- a mere half-billion years in the making.

An excellent exposure of the Champlain Thrust Fault, which stretches 200 miles from Canada to the Catskills, is visible at Lone Rock Point in Burlington, ideally from the Lake Champlain ferry shortly after it leaves the dock.

For more information, visit: anr.state.vt.us/dec/geo/chthrust.htm

Swanton Red: What it's used for and where to get it

For any artisans, contractors, or consumers who might want to purchase a piece of Swanton history, several blocks of Swanton Red marble are still available for cutting, according to Robert Pye, director of the Vermont Marble Museum. Swanton Red is used for fireplace surrounds, mantels, hearths, floor tiles, walls, and specialty gift items, such as salt and pepper shakers, coasters, baking boards, vases, and lamps -- some of which are available for purchase in the museum's gift shop.

For more information, visit: vermont-marble.com