The Whetstone Quarry

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After an hour or so of picking and digging, we collected an armload each of smooth flat rocks and made our way back into town, busily honing our pocketknives as we went. We both ran out of spit well before the first mile, and the stones were thoroughly glazed.

Back at the shop I took one of the likelier-looking stones and began to dress it. After about ten minutes of rubbing on the side of a broken sandstone wheel kept constantly flushed with water, the surface shone like deep green marble. Giving the rock a splash of kerosene, I gave it a proper trial on a chisel. It was as good, a stone as I had ever used.

Of course my opinion is probably prejudiced by the adventure of having found the old quarry on the ridge, for this kind of rediscovery is one of my favorite events. Even if the stones had not been that good, they would have been priceless to me.

I decided to find out more about this quarry on the hill. For years it had been just an annoying enigma for me on the tattered 1891 map of the county that hung on the back wall of the shop. I asked several of the old families in the surrounding area if they had ever heard of the quarry. Finally, I found one woman who remembered her father's mentioning the old whetstone mine. She had never seen it, though, and I promised her that we would make a trip up there so that she could.

Finding only hints of information from the local people, I contacted the geology department at the local university. Only seven miles distant from the quarry and having had a school of mineralogy since 1820, it figured to have some records of it somewhere.

Within a few days a professor there had managed to locate a report published in the American Journal of Science for 1828 on the geology of North Carolina written by Dennis Olmstead, who was himself a professor of chemistry and mineralogy at the university. This report provided a gold mine of information.

"The most valuable bed that I have met with," he said, "is about seven miles west of Chapel-Hill. It is known by the name of M'Cauley's quarry. It has been opened on the summit of a hill, which forms one of three parallel ranges extending from north east to south west." This is exactly where we had been 160 years later. The overgrown ridge road passing by it was apparently well traveled then because he went on to say that "although many thousand hones have been taken from this spot by travelers and others, yet as the quarry has not been wrought for the market, the excavations have been carried to very little depth."

Olmstead found great variations in quality among stones obtained from the same spot, describing the best as having an olive green color and transparent edges. The best were apparently very good, as he goes on to say. "Our carpenters lay aside, for them, the best Turkey hones of the market.... Some of the specimens, when polished, present a clouded or chequered surface, with a high lustre, and possess no small degree of beauty. Mechanics, in the vicinity of the quarry, frequently supply themselves with masses of eight or ten pounds weight. One side being faced, it is used as a hone, and is generally valued in proportion to the time it has been in use, for thus it acquires smoothness and hardness. The quality is frequently much improved by becoming thoroughly soaked with oil."

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