Limestone

Limestone has been used as a building material since the time of the Egyptians, or possibly even longer. The Ohio Statehouse was built between 1839 and 1861 in the Greek Revival style using limestone from the Columbus Limestone quarries near the Scioto River, now known as the Marble Cliff Quarry. Large pieces of limestone are used as armor stone for marine construction in seawalls, and crushed limestone is used widely for road construction and in concrete mixes. Limestone is also used in steelmaking as a flux agent to help remove impurities from iron, and much of the early stone quarried from Marblehead was used in Lorain, Cleveland, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh in the steelmaking industry. Limestone is calcium carbonate, but when heated to around 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, carbon dioxide is driven off, leaving calcium oxide known as lime or quicklime. Many kilns were built on the Marblehead Peninsula to produce quicklime, first as simple pits filled with alternating layers of fuel and crushed limestone, and later as stone structures similar to large ovens. Quicklime was shipped in wooden barrels and used for agricultural soil conditioning, to reduce odors in mass burials during cholera outbreaks, to make lime mortar and concrete, and to make whitewash, which preserved and beautified wooden and masonry structures and had mild antimicrobial properties; the stone of the Marblehead Lighthouse was whitewashed each year. Before the invention of portland cement in the 1870s, lime mortar was the standard for masonry construction. Lime is also added to most everyday soda-lime glass to lower the melt temperature of pure silica, reducing energy costs and helping molten glass flow more easily as it is molded. Powdered lime is also used as a filler in paints, paper, ceramics, and plastics.

Marblehead, Ohio · United States