Quarrying history and use of Berea Sandstone in northeastern Ohio

摘要

The Late Devonian Berea Sandstone is one of the best known and most studied sandstones in the world. It has been widely used as a dimension stone and for grindstones, and in the subsurface it is a source of water, oil, and gas. It is also a permeability and compression-strength standard. Berea Sandstone has been quarried, beginning in the 1820s, from a number of northeastern Ohio counties, including Cuyahoga, Erie, Summit, and Lake Counties. Berea Sandstone continues to be quarried today in small amounts in eastern Erie County. Some of its historic quarries in northeastern Ohio have been illustrated and described in geological publications and works on local history, but other quarries have been poorly documented or not documented at all. It is difficult to find information on the earliest quarries. Some of the best information is available for late nineteenth and early twentieth century quarries: the extent, as well as the location, of historic quarries is depicted in atlases published in the later 1800s and the first decade of the twentieth century; and production statistics and other information can be gleaned from the non-population schedules of the 1880 census. The historic quarries vary in terms of both geographical aspect and geological facies. Quarry types range from shallow quarries developed in a lowland wetland in western Cuyahoga County, to much more extensive, and very deep quarries developed in extremely thick Berea deposits in Lorain County associated with subsidence of a Devonian delta located in that area. Most, but not all buildings that have been identified in historic works, and even corporate literature, as being made of Berea Sandstone are actually made of this stone. The stone used for buildings has in some cases been confused with various other rock units of northeastern Ohio. In many cases, Berea Sandstone used for buildings and other structures can be identified by one or more of the following: fine- to medium grain size; modal clast composition; small ferruginous spots; distinctive planar and color delineated horizontal bedding; microfaulting; and a variety of ripple marks characteristic of both unidirectional and oscillatory flow.