The 30-foot entrance columns at Dale Cemetery, designed by architect Howard Daniels, were made of a stone nicknamed Sing Sing marble, a coarse dolomitic limestone quarried by inmates at nearby Sing Sing Prison. This material also appeared in many of the cemetery's headstones, monuments, steps, walls, and other structures, and beginning in the 1830s it was widely used in buildings and structures throughout the Village of Sing Sing (Ossining), the Lower Hudson Valley Region, and New York City, including Lyndhurst in Tarrytown and the first New York University building. The widespread use of this convict-quarried stone helped spark the Stone Cutters Riot of 1834, when members of the New York Stone Cutter's Guild violently protested the use of cheap prison labor that lowered their wages, rioting for four days in lower Manhattan until the National Guard was called in. Twenty years later, the stone caused further controversy for Dale Cemetery founding treasurer Munson Lockwood, who as warden of Sing Sing Prison during the cemetery's construction was accused of misappropriating prison labor and prison stone, and the scandal, fueled by reporting from The New York Times, drove him from office. By the 1870s, builders had largely abandoned the stone in favor of bricks.