Bluestone

This article is about various "blue" building stones. For other uses, see Bluestone (disambiguation).

Carn Menyn bluestones.These dolerite slabs, split by frost action, seem to be stacked ready for the taking and many have been removed over the centuries for use locally but it remains unresolved whether the Stonehenge bluestones were conveyed thence by human or glacial means.

Bluestone is a cultural or commercial name for a number of dimension or building stone varieties, including:

• basalt in Victoria, Australia, and in New Zealand;
• the dolerite of Stonehenge in Britain;
• a feldspathic sandstone in the U.S. and Canada;
• limestone in the Shenandoah Valley in the USA, from the Hainaut quarries in Soignies, Belgium and from quarries in County Carlow, County Galway and County Kilkenny in Ireland; and
• slate in South Australia

Stonehenge

The term "bluestone" in Britain is used in a loose sense to cover all of the "foreign" stones at Stonehenge. It is a "convenience" label rather than a geological term, since at least 20 different rock types are represented. One of the most common rocks in the assemblage is known as Preseli Spotted Dolerite—a chemically altered igneous rock containing spots or clusters of secondary minerals replacing plagioclase feldspar. It is a medium grained dark and heavy rock, harder than granite. Preseli bluestone tools, such as axes, have been discovered elsewhere within the British Isles. Many of them appear to have been made in or near Stonehenge, since there are petrographic similarities with some of the spotted dolerites there.

The bluestones at Stonehenge were placed there during the third phase of construction at Stonehenge around 2300 BC. It is assumed that there were about 80 of them originally, but this has never been proven since only 43 remain. The stones are estimated to weigh between 2 and 4 tons each. The majority of them are believed to have been brought from the Preseli Hills, about 250 kilometres (150 miles) away in Wales, either through glaciation (glacial erratic theory) or through humans organizing their transportation. If a glacier transported the stones, then it must have been the Irish Sea Glacier. In such event, one might expect to find other bluestones near the Stonehenge site, but no such bluestones (apart from fragments) have been found.

The archaeological find of the Boscombe Bowmen has been cited in support of the human transport theory, while new glacier modelling supports the erratic theory. Preseli Bluestone dolerite axe heads have been found around the Preseli Hills as well, indicating that there was a population who knew how to work with the stones, but researchers reporting in 2015 found no firm evidence of quarrying at Rhosyfelin in the Preselis.

A summary of the major aspects of the Stonehenge "bluestone conundrum" was published in 2008. In the same year a book devoted specifically to the problem of bluestone provenance and transport concluded that the Stonehenge bluestones are essentially an ill-sorted assemblage of glacial erratics. Further research into the origin of the bluestones was published in 2012.

Australia

HM Prison Pentridge was one of the many buildings constructed of local bluestone in Melbourne in the 19th century

There are two distinct building materials called "bluestone" in Australia. In Victoria, what is known as bluestone is a basalt or olivine basalt. It was one of the favoured building materials during the Victorian Gold Rush period of the 1850s. In Melbourne it was extracted from quarries throughout the inner northern suburbs, such as Clifton Hill, Brunswick and Coburg, where the quarry used to source the stone for Pentridge Prison is now Coburg Lake. Bluestone was also sourced in many other regions of the Victorian volcanic plains, and used in towns and cities of central and western regions, including Ballarat, Geelong, Kyneton, Port Fairy and Portland. It is still quarried at a number of places around the state.

Bluestone is very hard and therefore difficult to work, so it was predominantly used for warehouses, miscellaneous walls, and the foundations of buildings. However, a number of significant bluestone buildings exist, including the Old Melbourne Gaol, Pentridge Prison, St Patrick's Cathedral, Victoria Barracks, Melbourne Grammar School, Deaf Children Australia and Victorian College for the Deaf, Vision Australia, the Goldsbrough Mort warehouses (Bourke Street) and the Timeball Tower, as well as St Mary's Basilica in Geelong. Some examples of other major structures that use bluestone include Princes Bridge, the adjacent Federation Wharf, and Hawthorn Bridge. Because of its distinctive qualities, post-modern Melbourne buildings have also made use of bluestone for nostalgic reasons. These include the Southgate complex and promenade in Southbank, Victoria, and apartment buildings such as the Melburnian.

Bluestone was also used extensively as cobblestone, and for kerbs and gutters, many examples which still exist in some of Melbourne's smaller city lanes and 19th Century inner suburban lanes. Crushed bluestone aggregate, known as bluemetal, is still used extensively in Victoria as railway ballast, road base, and, combined with bitumen, as road surfacing material, as well as in concrete making.

Bluestone buildings in Adelaide

Typical colouring caused by mineralisation in Adelaide bluestone.

In South Australia, the name bluestone is given to a form of slate which is much less durable than Victorian bluestone, but was valued for its decorative appearance. The interior of the stone is usually pale grey or beige in colour, but is given attractively coloured surfaces by ferric oxide and other minerals deposited in joints and bedding planes. The slate is laid in masonry with the mineralised surfaces exposed. Bluestone was most popular from about the 1850s to the 1920s, quarried in the Adelaide Hills at Dry Creek, O'Halloran Hill (formerly Tapley's Hill) and Glen Osmond, and a number of other places in rural areas.

New Zealand

Dunedin Railway Station (centre) and Law Courts (right), showing dark bluestone and creamy Oamaru stone construction.

Timaru bluestone is an attractive building material, used both historically and to the present. It is a grey basalt similar to Victorian bluestone, quarried near Timaru in the South Island. Bluestone from near Kokonga in Central Otago is also widely used, and is the main construction material (often with facing of Oamaru stone, a local compact limestone) in many of the notable historic buildings in the southern South Island, most of which were constructed during the financial boom following the Central Otago gold rush.

Prominent structures to use this combination include Otago University Registry Building, Dunedin Law Courts, and Dunedin Railway Station. Similar construction using Timaru bluestone was used for Christchurch Arts Centre.

United States and Canada

Bluestone works at Malden, Ulster County, New York

The best known American variety of bluestone is a feldspathic sandstone, which is produced in hundreds of small quarries in adjacent areas of Pennsylvania and New York. It is also quarried in the Canadian Appalachians near Deer Lake in Western Newfoundland. The Pennsylvania Bluestone Association has 105 members, the vast majority of them quarriers. The other, lesser known, type of American bluestone is formed from a different sedimentary rock, limestone. The limestone is abundant in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia yet The Frazier Quarry is the only remaining quarry that cuts dimension stone from it.

Bluestone from Pennsylvania and New York is commercially known as bluestone or Pennsylvania Bluestone. These are a group of sandstones defined as feldspathic greywacke. The sand-sized grains from which bluestone is constituted were deposited in the Catskill Delta during the Middle to Upper Devonian Period of the Paleozoic Era, approximately 370 to 345 million years ago. If the initial deposit was made under slow moving water the ripples of the water action on the sand or mud will be revealed. This deposition process may be seen today at any ocean beach in shallow water or in a stream bed where conditions allow it to be observed. The term "bluestone" is derived from a deep-blue-colored sandstone first found in Ulster County, New York.

The Catskill Delta was created from run off from the Acadian Mountains ("Ancestral Appalachians") which covered the area where New York City now exists. This Delta ran in a narrow band from southwest to northeast and today provides the base material for the high-quality bluestone which is quarried from the Catskill Mountains and Northeast Pennsylvania.

As the product became more popular as an architectural and building stone and demand grew, quarrying for it spread throughout south central New York and northeast Pennsylvania. It is a unique commodity of particular value to the economy of Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania. The Starrucca Viaduct, finished in 1848, is often referred to as an example of the strength and durability of Pennsylvania Bluestone as a building material.

Bluestone from the Shenandoah Valley is regionally known as bluestone but a less ambiguous name is Shenandoah Valley Bluestone. The limestone formed during the Ordovician Period approximately 450 to 500 million years ago, but it was formed at the bottom of a relatively shallow ocean that then covered what is today Rockingham County, Virginia. However, the limestone that accumulated in Rockingham County was darker in color than most other limestone deposits because it was in deeper waters exposed to less light. The darker blue color resulted in limestone from this region to be dubbed bluestone and with two sequences measuring about 10,000 ft, it gives the area one of the largest limestone deposits in the world. The stone eventually fades from a deep blue to a light grey after prolonged exposure to the sun and rain.

Given the abundance of the stone in the Rockingham County area, the first settlers used it as foundations and chimneys for their houses. When James Madison University was built, the native bluestone was used to construct the buildings because of its high quality and cultural ties. The Frazier Quarry in Harrisonburg, Virginia Continues to supply JMU with the native bluestone.

See also

• Theories about Stonehenge

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Jack, R Lockhart. The Building Stones of South Australia. Bulletin No. 10, Geological Survey of South Australia, Adelaide, 1923.
• Jones, Nancy. Rooted on Bluestone Hill: A History of James Madison University. Center for American Places, Inc. Santa Fe, NM. 2004.
• John, Brian. The Bluestone Enigma: Stonehenge, Preseli and the Ice Age. Greencroft Books, 2008, page 95. ISBN 978-0-905559-89-6.

External links

• Examination of the conflicting theories relating to the Stonehenge bluestones
• Enigma of the Stonehenge Bluestones and the Preseli Hills
• Wessex Archaeology's Bluestone information
• How American bluestone is quarried
• Pennsylvanian bluestone
• Article on Cultured Bluestone
• History of Shenandoah Valley Bluestone
• Secrets of the Preseli Bluestones
• A Brief Geologic History of Rockingham County
• Dig Pinpoints Stonehenge Origins
• Susquehanna County: The Heart of Pennsylvania Bluestone
• "Bluestone Sidewalks" (Bluestone quarried in the state of New York), Scientific American, Vol. LXIII, No. 21, New York, November 22, 1890