Village Roofs Shingled with Vermont Slate
A practicality in time gone by to use local materials from local quarries
By Roger Donegan
As a crow flies low over Hinesburg Village it pans the rooftops in town center, including Town Hall, which structures are prudently protected from the elements of the four seasons by expanses of sheet metal, synthetic asphalt and slate shingle.
A slate shingled roof has undeniable allure and must have been the most practical choice for roof protection in these parts at one time. It’s likely the mauve shaded slate shingles on period structures in the village, and on a few collapsing barns on the fringes of town, were procured in-state from Vermont’s own landscape.
Hinesburg’s 1980 State Registry Nomination in the completed forms of the VT Historic Sites and Structures Survey include data on most pre-1940 structures in Hinesburg. Slate roofs were noted in a line item on the form. As dense as most rock, thinly cut slate shingles have real weight. Since shipping weight and the distance material needs to travel are two universal cost factors, Vermont slate quarries are likely to have been the source of slate on houses in Hinesburg today.
Old slate shingles were hand-fashioned. When handsomely applied to a roof they are as attractive as any building feature can be. A crate of slate shingle is as uniform as a deck of playing cards. At one time these were expertly cleaved from a select rectangular block of slate using a broad flat chisel hit with a hand held hammer.
Slate shingle is more hung than nailed home on a roof and is held in place by hollow copper nails through 2 top corner holes. Slate shingles are reusable if recovered with care and can last long after the first hundred years. The slate shingle boom began as an aside on small family farms in the 1840s which grew up to a full blown industry, and a regional identity by 1908. The nascent Troy-Rutland Railroad made all the difference getting slate to market.
Vermont’s “Slate Valley”, along the waters of the Mettawee River, is in an 8-mile stretch of the northern Taconic Mountain slate belt, a geologic washboard overlying two clashing plates of underlying bedrock on the southern VT border with NY. (See A Crease in the Landscape, an Alfred Z. Solomon Cultural Heritage Trail Publication (2015)).
Most slate is grey, like the clay that formed it. However this is the only slate region in the world that contains the full range of slate colors from green to purple to red. Slate Valley of NY and VT is the primary source of slate in North America.
The Slate Valley Museum is in Granville NY although it’s easy to go out the front or back door and be in Vermont. The Slate Valley Driving Tour provided by the museum gives routes through VT towns such as North Poultney, South Poultney and Poultney in the heart of Slate Valley dotted with obvious “features of slate quarrying”. North Poultney is still a hive of quarrying activity. The Eureka Quarry, the longest continuously operated slate quarry in this area, opened in 1852.
When quarry operations began on the edge of Lake Bomoseen barges and sleighs were used to move slate product to a rail siding near the lake’s southern tip. The tour to West Castleton leads you to Fair Haven where slate quarrying took hold in western Rutland County. Fair Haven is at the north end of the Slate Valley. Fair Haven High School team uniforms bear the logo “The Slaters”.
In 1989 a Smithsonian Institute video documented the fading industry standard use of -“quarry sticks” like derricks of which hundreds once studded the Valley, the overhead cable ways, seemingly the precursors of modern day apparatus such as ski lifts and tramways, and the aerial carriers at the Eureka Quarry.
The Museum is home to an authentic 4-feet by 8-feet panel illustration of slate workers in action by Martha Levy completed in 1939 on consignment with the WPA Federal Art Project. While effectively celebrating slate quarry work the panels provide a feel for tools used and the need for heavy lifting.
How does one present the scene of the drawing cable attached to a carriage that is attached to a fall-block called a “billy wheel” and typically slung with a monolithic block of slate or a steel box brimming with quarry debris. The lifting movement was horizontally straight across an open quarry then vertically in and out of the pit. Most iconic slate quarry images invariably include a “Jones”-like or “Florey” carriage in the picture for effect.
Seeing one of these overt mechanical devices on a drawing cable suspended in midair bring flying trapezes to mind.