Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/371

 crosses Sullivan Comity until the Delaware River is reached, where quarrying is carried on all the way from Port Jervis to Narrowsburg on both sides of the river. Very little quarrying is done through the mountainous districts, although many quarries have been opened with a fair profit in Delaware County along the line of the Ulster and Delaware Railroad, The stone produced here, as well as along the Delaware River, is of a deep-red color, contains large quantities of ferruginous matter, is of uneven texture, requiring more cutting, and is much inferior to the stone quarried in Ulster County.

The history of the discovery and first attempt to quarry bluestone for the market is shrouded in uncertainty. It is known,



however, that a man named Moray opened a quarry at what has since been called Moray Hill, near Kingston, as early as 1826. His son, the late Daniel Moray, of Kingston, said that his father was the first person to put bluestone as a product on the market, drawing the stone to Kingston with an ox team and selling it for window-sills and lintels. Philip Van de Bogart Lockwood was the most prominent producer of bluestone for many years after this, hauling the quarried product to the docks at Kingston Point, where it was loaded on sailing vessels and taken to the New York market. Later on, Abijah Smith built a dock and bought stone at Wilbur, which he shipped to New York, and in the early fifties the industry became so important that a plank road, eleven miles in length, was built on the Ulster and Delaware turnpike through