Daniel Garber, The Limeport Quarry

Garber depicts the quarry at Limeport, Pennsylvania, and its neighboring Saucon Creek in soft lines and dramatic raking light. Limeport was located at the center of the state’s “slate belt,” a mining region that flourished with the production of roofing slate from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. By 1947, when Garber made this etching, asphalt had largely replaced slate as the preferred roofing material, and many slate quarries had closed. Indeed, the absence of human activity and the trees emerging at top suggest that the quarry may have been abandoned.