Waldorf High School Carves Marble
by Stephen Keith Sagarin, PhD, Faculty Chair - 12 May 2009

Great Barrington Waldorf High School students visited the dormant marble quarry at Tom Garrity’s LB Corporation in Lee, Massachusetts, yesterday (May 7, 2009) in order to select stones to carve. The Berkshire Lee marble is “the hardest available,” according to Mr. Garrity, and therefore excellent for sculpture. “It crushes at 26,000 pounds per square inch,” he said, “and most other marble crushes at around 14,000.” Lee marble may be found in the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and building foundations, facades, and sculptures from Boston through New York and Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. Before railroads reached Vermont marble quarries, Berkshire County was home of the largest and most profitable marble mining in the country.

Mr. Garrity gave a tour of the quarry, 140 feet deep (90 feet of which is groundwater), from which 20 ton blocks were mined from the early 1800s until the 1990s. Mr. Garrity said that he hasn’t used up the marble quarried then, but can re-open the pit when necessary. His company currently does industrial construction, but sells marble products in Europe and Canada, where, he says, the market is greater than in the U.S. He showed the students hand-carved fireplace surrounds, pilasters, countertops, and follies that demonstrate the skill of a professional carver.

Carving stone is hard work, whether done with hand tools or modern electric and pneumatic ones. As he showed the students drawings and photos of the quarry in operation, Mr. Garrity advised the students to “stay in school and then go to college.”

Waldorf High School students took their stones, which weigh between 40 and 60 pounds each, back to the school, where they will carve them, working outdoors, through the spring. Their first project is to carve a birdbath, planning the size, shape, and depth, and learning to use chisels that are unchanged since the time of Michelangelo. Their teacher is local artisan Guy Nordoff, who studied sculpture in Dornach, Switzerland.

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