Tennessee marble
[5] The stone occurs in belts of Ordovician-period rocks known as the Holston Formation[5] and is quarried primarily in Knox, Blount, Loudon, Union, and Hawkins counties.
The Holston Formation, in which Tennessee marble is found, occurs in a series of belts that follow the natural folds and faults of the ridges and valleys.
[5] Tennessee marble was formed from the accumulation of bryozoan and other primordial marine lifeforms 460 million years ago, during the Ordovician period.
Mule teams, often led by local African American entrepreneurs, carried the blocks to the Holston River, where they were loaded onto flatboats and transported downstream.
[11] In 1873, federal architect Alfred B. Mullett used Tennessee marble for Knoxville's Post Office and Customs House, sparking a nationwide curiosity in the stone.
[12] This number had doubled within a decade,[13] as the rising popularity of Neoclassical architecture brought about a rapid increase in demand for marble.
The community of Concord, located west of Knoxville, became a key marble transloading center, where blocks were transferred from boats to rail cars for transport out of the region.
Monuments and buildings constructed of Tennessee marble during the early 20th century include the St. Paul Public Library in Minnesota, the Richard C. Lee U.S.
[11] The rise of modern architecture and a preference for the use of concrete, coupled with the onset of the Great Depression, led to a decline in the Tennessee marble industry by the end of the 1920s.
The stone experienced a brief resurgence in the 1930s as New Deal federal construction projects encouraged the use of locally quarried building materials.
The rise in foreign competition and changes in demand for building materials led to further decline, and most Tennessee marble companies had closed by the 1980s.
[16] Sculptor Jack Rich described Tennessee marble as an "excellent sculptural stone," though difficult to work with due to its hardness.
[22] The Piccirilli Brothers also worked with the stone, most notably creating the entrance tripods at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington,[23] and several statues at the base of the USS Maine National Monument in New York.
[1] Other notable Tennessee marble works include Frances Rich's nurses' memorial ("Spirit of Nursing") at Arlington National Cemetery;[25] Bruno Louis Zimm's Slocum Memorial Fountain in New York's Tompkins Square Park;[26] Joseph Emile Renier's Pomona at Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina;[27] and Cliff Fragua's statue of the Pueblo leader Po'pay in the National Statuary Hall.
