Through May and June of 2025, I had the opportunity to work on the Vermont Marble Digital Humanities project as an internship funded by the Richard Hampton Jenrette Foundation for the Center for Architectural Conservation through Weitzman.
I began by spending four weeks working primarily at the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center: the historic site of the Vermont Marble Company’s quarrying operations in West Rutland, VT. Over this time, I also visited other sites integral to understanding the company’s development as well as archival collections relating to the company and the development of the Rutland area from the mid-19th to late 20th centuries. Studying remaining evidence on the site and looking at primary documents relating to the company’s expansion and influence helped best prepare me for the four weeks spent at the office of the Center for Architectural Conservation in Philadelphia, PA, looking at interpreting the material I had gathered into graphics and narrative information to share with the public in an attempt to contextualize the rich cultural and industrial heritage the region possesses relating to the Vermont Marble Company.
In beginning this project, it was encouraging to see an abundance of information to draw from in the form of historic maps, historic photographs, and written text. Although somewhat daunting at times in trying to determine the scope of the work to be accomplished in these eight weeks, I consider it a “good” problem to have too much to learn from rather than not enough, and I am certain students such as myself from the University of Pennsylvania or other institutions have plenty of avenues to go down in the rich history of Vermont’s marble valley.
In better understanding the ways in which the current site of the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center has changed over time especially since the first quarries began in the mid-19th century, historic maps and historic photographs have been especially helpful. Historic maps found online and in archives around Vermont such as the Vermont Historical Society in Barre, the Rutland Historical Society, and West Rutland’s own map collection at the town hall prove incredibly helpful as a starting point for understanding what used to be and how the Vermont Marble Company operated over time.
When exploring areas surrounding the site’s quarries and mills in the field, we were able to look at where we were in real time using GPS information in reference to these historic maps so we might better understand things we found or be better prepared for what to look for. Looking at historic maps like the 1910 Sanborn map helped us know what was once there and contextualize some of the remaining evidence we found, asking questions like “What do we know about these stones we’ve found? What does understanding whether they’re rough or smooth tell us? Was this once the walls of a building with mortar? Or simply stones placed for the changes in grade needed to accommodate railroad tracks?”
In addition to this on site investigation, however, reading documents online, in print, and through archives like the Vermont Historical Society’s Leahy Library proved crucial to understanding how the quarrying and mill process worked to better understand the unusual building types that made up sites like that in West Rutland. The 1892 facilities report, for example, provides a detailed account of not only the structures that made up the site but their contents and how they functioned with power. One must first understand the function of items like gangsaws and sand feed pumps described in their historic context before being able to envision the methods of marble extraction and processing going on between quarries, tracks, and mills. Pamphlets like Speaking of Marble (1920) and Little Pictures of A Big Industry (1929) at the Vermont Historical Society’s archives in Barre that were published by the Vermont Marble Company as well as online researched aided in my understanding of the development of the stone quarrying industry in America as a whole as well as the marble industry’s development specifically in Vermont.
Though somewhat nonlinear, this process of discovery—especially in my four weeks spent in West Rutland—influenced greatly the structure with which I tried to shape the website around. First, given that I began this process with little knowledge about how stone is quarried and processed, I aimed to present the public with an understanding of these processes and terminology, as I found it integral as a basis upon which to understand the history of the development of the Vermont Marble Company. Understanding the factors considered when deciding where and how to extract stone as well as the advances in technology that revolutionized stone quarrying in the late 19th and early 20th centuries brings some context to why the company grew as quickly and to the scale that it did.
In many ways, the changes we see on a small scale over the course of quarrying efforts at West Rutland from the mid-19th to later 20th centuries reflect historic trends on varying scales quite closely. For example, the beginnings of quarrying efforts in West Rutland in 1844 closely mirrors those seen in areas like Rutland and Proctor before the industry exploded with the introduction of the railroads in the early 1850s. The expansion of the structures supporting the Rutland Marble Company and Sheldon Marble Company properties in the 1860s follows the way the industry began to pick up steam with the advent of the channeling machine in 1863 and the growing trend of marble building construction. The purchase of the Sheldon Marble Company property in 1892 marks a sufficient benchmark to what may be considered the end of Redfield Proctor and the Vermont Marble Company’s consolidation of smaller companies in the Rutland area beginning in 1880. The introduction of the electric gantry crane around 1921 reflects the beginnings of widespread use of electric power in the United States.
Ultimately, so much of what I learned in just my first year in the HSPV program influenced my work on this project. Aspects of archival research and writing in Documentation I as well as photography and graphic representation built upon my architecture background in Documentation II helped equip me with the tools to make the website I created rich and engaging. So much of Digital Media was necessary not only in graphic representation but especially in file management and even just an overall approach to discovering new programs able to be integrated into the website. And certainly I would not have been able to map and understand the case study of the site at West Rutland as easily without the GIS class I took in the spring. All of this helped me do a better job of telling the story of the Vermont Marble Company; a story of land use, industrial heritage, business management, and labor rights all contextualized within the span of the company’s influence over time.
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