Limestone brings noteriety to state

OOLITIC, Ind. -- Most people have never heard of the tiny Indiana towns of Oolitic, Ellettsville and Stinesville.\nBut anyone who has visited the Empire State Building, the Pentagon or the U.S. Capitol has seen the stately gray limestone that generations of Indiana stoneworkers have painstakingly pulled from earth around these towns, and hand-crafted into the building blocks that form banks, state capitols and courthouses throughout the country.\nThe projects are as varied as the landscape. Crews renovating the Empire State Building are using replacement stone quarried by Indiana Limestone Co., which also provided the original limestone for the building in 1931.\nIn Washington, D.C., the Pentagon, left with a gaping hole on one side during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was rebuilt with Indiana limestone.\nAnd in Philadelphia, nearly 2 acres of the stone is being used to build the National Constitution Center -- a 160,000-square-foot center dedicated to the U.S. Constitution and how it affects the daily lives of Americans.\n"Limestone is the nation's building stone," said Liz Barszczewski, the center's spokeswoman.\nAbout 80 percent of the limestone quarried in the United States comes from Indiana, though there also are pockets of the rock in Tennessee, Alabama and Texas.\nIndiana is rich in limestone from a shallow sea that dried up more than 350 million years ago and left the limestone behind. The limestone is the deepest and most uniform deposit found anywhere in the country, said Jim Owens, executive director of the Indiana Limestone Institute of America, a Bedford-based trade association.\nIn south-central Indiana, limestone has been an important source of jobs since before the Civil War and still provides a livelihood for hundreds of families.\nAfter extensive fires in Chicago and Boston in the 1870s burned large parts of those cities, limestone was in high demand for its durability and because it tended to show the least fire damage of many commonly used building materials.\nThe country's largest limestone quarrying and fabrication company, the Indiana Limestone Co. based in nearby Bedford, is providing the stone for the Constitutional Center in Philadelphia.