The largest marble company in the WORLD (100 exhibits, 27,000 square feet).  The earliest marble was quarried in 1836, followed by other marble companies.  In 1870 Redfield Proctor took over and brought this company into prominence once he became a Senator and drove business to his company by building monuments in Washington D.C. (I'm sure you could NOT legally do that today!!)  Buildings made with this marble include the U. S. Supreme Court, Jefferson Memorial, the Supreme  Court, the Arlington Memorial Amphitheater & cemetery markers at Arlington Cemetery, and the rotunda columns in the National Gallery of Art.

Proctor, VT

This left-hand photo is 18,500 pounds of Verdi Green Marble.  The right-hand photo is Glenn in the entryway of 188,521 pounds of the famous white marble.  Wow.  What a start.

The museum was created from a wing of the original factory, so the flavor of this industry and its history is preserved.  We recommend visiting this place highly.

www.vermont-marble.com

Overhead view of one of the marble quarries in Vermont

Cutting the blocks of marble, huge!  (1903) The Danby Quarry produced the Supreme Court Building, the Jefferson Memorial, and the Senate office building

 Built in 1934, the Chapel is made of many varieties of Vermont marble that are no longer quarried.  

The Last Supper bas-relief was carved by Italian sculptor F. tonelli, in Proctor, in the 1950's.  Replicas of this were commissioned by churches all over the U.S.

Madonna in marble.  Beautiful does not describe it.

A multi-decade project to honor our country's leaders.  Each past U.S. President has been hand carved in bas-relief out of Vermont Danby White and Vermont Statuary White marble from West Rutland.  President Clinton in the center is a work in progress.

President John F. Kennedy

More info on the marble sculptor, Renzo Palmerini, that sculpted most of all the presidents:

This unexpected room includes a Triceratops named Raymond excavated in 1996 from North Dakota

.. and fluorescent minerals shown under long & short wave.  Even my camera picked up the beautiful rich colors.

Tens of thousands of cemetery markers were made from Vermont marble here, including those for American soldiers at Arlington Cemetery in Washington D.C.  The markers made date from the Civil War, Spanish American War, WW I & II, Korea, and Vietnam, shown here.

Here are panels of marble samples filling this entire room.  Wow.

Three marbles are local: Vermont Verde Antique, Vermont Danby White, and Vermont Swanton Red.  We found marbles of two (white & green), but not of the red marble (as in the cheese cutting board below).  This actually prompted another drive (see below).

He told us to drive back over the bridge, make a left into a small park where we could access the riverbank where cut pieces from the old mill upstream might be found.  

There we found a set of blocks of Swanton marble right there in the park.

We immediately found cut pieces of all three marbles (white/gray, green and the Swanton red) there on the riverbank, 

Gray/white on the left, and the great Swanton Red marbles

and indeed, huge buried boulders of the red marble too.  If we'd driven our own van instead of flying and renting a car, we would surely have dug up this boulder to take home.

Here is a wider view of both sides of the riverbank, the right-hand photo shows the bridge we came across.  

 So we drove back to the Lumber yard, and presented John with a nice specimen of cut Swanton marble as a thank you for the directions.

He also directed us to a church in town that is completely made of rough-hewn blocks of the Swanton red marble quarried right there in their town.  An appropriate ending to a successful hunt!

And we found white marble with grey veins right beside the road and the waterfall next to the American Precision Museum in Windsor, VT  

Here's the scoop on what marble is...

Marble is a metamorphic rock resulting from metamorphism of sedimentary, carbonate rocks (limestone or dolomite).  This process causes a complete re-crystallization of the original rock into an interlocking mosaic of calcite, aragonite and/or dolomite crystals. The temperatures and pressures necessary to form marble usually destroy any fossils and sedimentary textures present in the original rock.

Pure white marble is the result of metamorphism of very pure limestone. The characteristic swirls and veins of many colored marble varieties are usually due to various mineral impurities such as clay, silt, sand, iron oxides or chert which were originally present as grains or layers in the limestone. Green coloration is often due to serpentine contact. These various impurities have been mobilized and re-crystallized by the intense pressure and heat of the metamorphism.

Comparative weights & measures of marble to sandstone, brick, coal, water, ice, glass, brass, steel, wrought iron, silver lead, gold and platinum (thanks to the Vermont Marble Museum display):