In Limestone Country

by Scott Russell Sanders

From a patch of land in southern Indiana has come the stone for many of the country's most famous buildings, including the Washington Cathedral, the Pentagon, the Empire State Building, and Chicago's Tribune Tower. If you live anywhere within the lower forty-eight states you probably live within walking distance of library, bank, monument, church, house or skyscraper built with Indiana limestone. In Limestone Country  is the story of the stone, from its geologic origins through its mining history to the present. Sanders records the folklore, the craft, the distinct culture that has grown up around Indiana limestone. Above all we hear the voices of those who have worked all their lives in the quarries and "I oughn't be telling you all this" says a former cutter, "but its only the truth."

Genres: Essays, Memoir

188 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1945

About the author

Scott Russell Sanders is the award-winning author of A Private History of Awe, Hunting for Hope, A Conservationist Manifesto, Dancing in Dreamtime, and two dozen other books of fiction, personal narrative, and essays. His father came from a family of cotton farmers in Mississippi, his mother from an immigrant doctor’s family in Chicago. He spent his early childhood in Tennessee and his school years in Ohio, Rhode Island, and Cambridge, England.

In his writing he is concerned with our place in nature, the practice of community, and the search for a spiritual path. He and his wife, Ruth, a biochemist, have reared two children in their hometown of Bloomington, in the hardwood hill country of southern Indiana. You can visit Scott at www.scottrussellsanders.com.

In August 2020, Counterpoint Press will publish his new collection of essays, The Way of Imagination, a reflection on healing and renewal in a time of climate disruption. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories inspired by photographs.

Reviews

[W. K. Sheldrake]

“When we disappear, we probably will carry a good many plants and animals down to extinction with us. But rocks won’t keep much record of our brief transit. For all our drilling and blasting, we have barely scratched this stoney planet. If you find comfort in that, if the rush and sizzle of life make you hunger for durable goods, if your blood pressure goes up and down with the stock market or baseball scores or political polls, if you fret about pulling off the monthly balancing act in your checkbook, if the world has spun you dizzy--you would do well to spend some time in stone country.”
Russell Scott Sanders, Limestone Country

Discovered this signed copy in the free library of the Durango (CO) last week. In the category of books beautifully written and based in love and sentiment for a home land, Scott writes an homage to Indiana Limestone--its natural history, its historical contribution to historical structures, and the hard-bitten hard scrabble memories of a gritty (literally) bygone industry. With poetic affection and inventiveness Scott shepherds his reader into a story scored by the energy and consciousness of a building era founded on a nation’s confidence in its monumentalism and the gift of landmark stolidness rested from the hardy crust of a geologically and anthropologically unique locality. Readers of Graves, Belden C. Lane, Craig Childs, McPhee, Dillard, Abbey, Leopold, Krutch, et al, would do well to spend some time with Sanders, another Hero of Place. I’ll read more RSR.

[Tamara]

Wow! I really enjoyed this book. Should be required reading for anyone that studies Indiana History/Geology. The end was beautiful. Very amusing stories. Learned a lot.

Favorite quote-the author has been given a piece of limestone with fossils..

“ “I lay my present on the hood and bent down to study it. Spirals, curlicues, ringlets: it was a fruitcake of fossils. It was all the shapes of a galaxy shrunken to fit my hand. Comets, Meteors. As many creatures had gone to make up this handful of stone as there are stars in the Milky Way”

[Valentine]

Anyone who can make a book about limestone in Indiana interesting is a genius. Sanders is the master of the meaning of "place" in our lives.