Four people on the record, and a company that does not fit inside it
The operation here is Elk Lake, a surface dimension-stone quarry about 2.33 miles south-west of the middle of this place, operator of record Meshoppen Stone Inc. Its Mine Safety and Health Administration record reports four employees.
Meshoppen Stone describes itself on its own site as one of the largest bluestone quarriers, fabricators and wholesale suppliers in the United States. That is the company’s description of itself, not a measurement — but four is plainly not the size of that business.
It is a reading of one quarry, and a truck that worked here may have come off a fleet many times that number.
The list is a sample here, not a census
That gap between a mine record and a business repeats across the whole district. American bluestone comes from roughly 150 mostly small quarries spread over adjacent parts of two states, and the Bluestone Association counts 105 members, most of them quarriers.
So absence from a list of ten says nothing at all about whether ground near you has a quarry on it. Coverage of industries made of many small operators is partial, and the smaller the typical operation the more partial it gets.
The stone itself is the dense fine-grained sandstone of the Catskill Formation, laid down in the Catskill Delta and once sold as Delaware Flags. It is quarried as flagstone, wall stone, treads and steps — a landscape and architectural product, not an aggregate.
Eleven posted crossings in the ten-mile circle, three of them the county’s
Those back roads are where the constraint actually sits. Within 10 miles of here the National Bridge Inventory records 91 structures and 11 of them are posted for load — six maintained by the state, three by Susquehanna County and two by townships.
The nearest is 2.59 miles south-east and rates at 40.8 metric tonnes operating, which a loaded flatbed clears. The one to know about is 7.35 miles north-west, a county bridge rating 15.4 tonnes operating, about 17.0 US tons — that is a genuine part load rather than a token restriction.
Read the circle rather than the county rate. Susquehanna County maintains 32 bridges in the whole National Bridge Inventory and posts 6 of them, so the county share rests on a small enough denominator that it moves sharply on one structure.
The freight leaves the district, and the odometer says so
That posted network is only the first few miles of the run. Bluestone is palletised and sold wholesale across the country, so the haul out of here is long-distance flatbed rather than a shuttle between a pit and a plant — New York City is about 150 miles south-east and Philadelphia about 130 miles south.
Which makes this district different from most stone country. A high odometer on a truck off this ground is the job being done properly, not a warning sign, and the hours-ahead-of-miles reading that fits a short-radius quarry does not apply here.
The other operations sit close in: McClain Quarry and a second McClain quarry 5.46 miles south-east, the Birchardville Quarry 9.15 miles north-west, Wilber #1 10.10 miles north-east and L & D Stoneworks 10.72 miles north-west. Meshoppen Stone’s own operation is 14.01 miles south-west and reports 60 people, against the four at Elk Lake.
Bluestone rides as thin irregular pieces stacked and banded on pallets, which is a load that settles and shifts, so strapping, edge protection and re-tensioning matter more than on a block haul. Deck wear reads as forklift tines and pallet corners rather than as scrape from a grapple.
- I am a long way down a township road.The 11 posted crossings inside 10 miles are not your problem to solve.
Between Elk Lake and the Birchardville Quarry they turn up steadily.