Men, horses and derricks work the Portland brownstone quarry in this mid-19th century view. A schooner on the Connecticut River waits to be loaded with quarried blocks. The spires of Wesleyan University rise above Middletown on the opposite bank of the river.

and immoral habits, whereby he would be deemed a bad citizen, may be discharged at the option of the company.¹⁰

Buildings built of brownstone or with brownstone foundations can be found throughout the state and are especially common in the Central Valley. It was also a popular rock for tombstones. Although an attractive rock, brownstone is actually a poor building material. The same qualities that make it easy to quarry also cause it to fall readily apart - it is soft and easily breaks along flat planes in the rock. Acid rain is also taking a toll, speeding up the weathering process by dissolving the mineral cement that glued the sediments into rock. As a result, brownstone buildings throughout the United States are slowly crumbling and many brownstone tombstones are becoming faceless monuments to the dead they memorialize, their epitaphs erased by erosion.

Although brownstone is no longer quarried in the Central Valley, traprock is currently excavated at six quarries. Traprock is used principally as crushed rock for railroad embankments, filler (called road metal) in asphalt roads, and other construction purposes. Traprock is especially suitable for crushed stone because it is both very durable and easy to crush, thanks to the network of cooling cracks that runs through it. The rock is still crushed today using a special mechanical jaw invented in the 1850s by Eli Whitney Blake, nephew of the more famous inventor, Eli Whitney.

Sand and gravel quarrying is another mining industry that has remained in the Central Valley. Sand and gravel, like crushed traprock, are primarily used for construction and road building. Hundreds of sand and gravel pits of various sizes are scattered throughout the state, scooped into the myriad deposits of glacial drift that cover the land. Stratified drift (usually glacial deltas) is almost always the type of drift mined, as it has far fewer unwanted boulders than till. Because of Glacial Lake Hitchcock and other glacial lakes, Connecticut's most extensive stratified drift deposits are in the Central Valley.

In many places, the varves of silt and clay laid down by the Central Valley's glacial lakes have been used to make brick. Around the turn of the 20th century, over thirty pits were active, together employing more

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