[3] According to an anecdote that his stepson, Tad Richards, relates, Fite discovered his passion for sculpting suddenly one day when, while sitting backstage during a performance, he absentmindedly pulled out his pocketknife and began whittling on a seamstress's discarded spool that had rolled under his chair.

[3] A recognized sculptor, Fite was invited in 1933 to organize the fine arts program at his alma mater (St. Stephen's), which, in the three years since his departure, had affiliated with Columbia University and been renamed Bard College.

He designed, engineered and hand-built a fine wooden house at the edge of the quarry grounds, facing the Catskill Mountains, and settled there in High Woods, a rural hamlet within the township of Saugerties, which neighbors Woodstock.

Over many years, he embellished his home's exterior with grand necklaces of quarryman's chains, and filled the interior and attached studio with murals, paintings and sculpture, going as far as whittling door handles of arched nudes, so that the building itself is now a museum of Fite's artwork.

[2] Harvey Fite died in May 1976 while at work on Opus 40,[1] in the process of completing an attached open-air "theater" at the site's northwestern extreme; he was riding a power lawnmower at the time, and he fell into the quarry from a 12-foot precipice.