Redstone Abandoned Quarry

In our younger days, visiting a quarry meant we were going to have a day of jumping off high cliffs and rock walls into murky, cold water. Today, with our jumping days behind us, visiting an abandoned quarry means we're about to get a snapshot into work and life from a generation past.

Quarries are fairly common throughout the granite state of New Hampshire, but Redstone Quarry is fascinating in that even though it is long since shut down (since the 1940's), much of the large equipment was deemed too expensive to remove and remains at the site and open for exploration today.

The first thing you'll discover walking the trail into Redstone Quarry is this giant finished pilaster. That's a word we never knew existed until this trip. A pilaster is similar to a pillar but with one side flat to fit flush against a wall. There actually were 2 of them at one point, but in the 1990's one of them was hauled out, cut, and installed as decorative columns in front of the Intervale post office. We marveled at how smooth and intact this one remains after being discarded so many decades ago - in fact Tina lamented more than a few times about how our kitchen counter tops aren't nearly so perfect.

We continued down the trail and next came to an area that, on a handwritten map we'd downloaded off the Internet, was listed as the Boiler Room. Maybe it was a room at one point, but now it looks like two giant cylinders stuffed with pipes, being overtaken by the forest.

In addition to giant pilasters and forest-eaten boilers, a couple of old buildings still remain uncollapsed throughout the quarry as well. Tread carefully through them as they're in various states of decay, but a few such as this one, the Carpenter Shop, remains sturdy enough to at least wander through the first floor like Madison was doing here.

Other buildings haven't fared quite so well, however.

One of the big draws to Redstone Quarry is seeing the two massive lathes, one of which is shown below.  These are impressive even to a non-machinist like me who sits behind a desk all day in a chair with lumbar support. The next afternoon I actually found myself on Youtube looking up videos of quarry lathes just to see one of these beasts in action.

We found many more pieces of equipment throughout the hike, and while some we recognized what they were used for, others we could only guess at. Every now and then you'd find a lever or wheel that wasn't frozen with rust, so half the fun became speculating as to what the equipment was used for and the other half was in looking for moving parts.

Redstone is a treasure trove of things to see and explore, and our advice would be to plan on making a complete day of it. And at the end of that day be sure to make the quick hike up Rattlesnake Mountain to the point where it overlooks the quarry's discarded stones.  The view from the top is well worth the climb and rewarding after a hard day of exploring.

Links:
Photo album
http://redstonequarrynh.org/