The Quarrying of Soapstone

   
 In 1933 the Cyr family constructed an office building for the company using blocks and lintels of soapstone. The township has been given the building by the previous owners and intend to convert the building into a soapstone museum.

 

 

This is the view of the original pit that I visited when I first started buying my stone from them in 1971.

Between 1925 and 1927, a massive steatite horizon was quarried northwest of Saint-Pierre-de-Broughton to produce refractory blocks and pencils to make marks on glass or steel. The quarry is located at the northwestern end of the Pennington sheet At this place, the original serpentinite is almost completely transformed into steatite and talc-carbonate rock

Stone was mined from this quary from 1927 until 2002, when they announced that the quarry was closed for good,

 The mine has been quarrying soapstone in different locations for various purposes (powdered talc used, among other things, for asphalt products dusting, joint cement and insecticide dust) since the 1880"s.
The stone is also used as soapstone slabs in the construction of wood stoves.
From this long period of use, the quarry had become so deep that a crane was used to raise the blocks from the depths of the quarry.

 

 

 
 The stone was cut from the wall of the quarry , by drilling a line of holes into the next layer of stone.
The block is then separated along the grain of the stone and raised to the surface by the crane.