The Marblehead Mile (Article 12) - Lorrie Haublaub

In this series we are taking an historical look at an area that covers approximately a mile of Main Street in downtown Marblehead. Heading east from the Village limits, we will discover the facts and the stories of how Marblehead became what it is today.

In our last article we left off near the public parking lot on Main Street in front of the old hospital building. Walking east, the next area you come to is all about the quarry.

On the north side of the road is the entrance to the quarry dock that stretches out into Lake Erie so the Great Lakes Freighters can be loaded with stone from the Holcim Quarry. On the south side of the road is an entrance to that quarry and you can see huge piles of stone ready to be loaded on the stone boats. How the stone gets from one side of Main Street to the other side and eventually out to the boats is accomplished by a structure that goes right over Main Street that carries the stone on conveyor belts. The sound of the belts moving, clickety clack for hours and then the toot of the stone boat’s horn when it departs for its destination, are familiar to everyone who walks Main Street or lives in the Jamestown area and are unique to this village. 

Marblehead stone has been quarried since 1834 when Alexander Clemens started his business. Many other people started quarries too and each had to have a dock to transport the stone. An 1863 map showed eleven docks sticking out into the water from many places on the peninsula. When the quarries consolidated into Kelleys Island Lime and Transport, which was later bought by Chemstone, then Standard Slag, then LaFarge, then Holcim and now Amrize, the other docks gradually disappeared and this one remains. LaFarge North America changed its name to Amrize in mid-2025. It stands for “ambition and rising”. It replaces the brands of LaFarge and Holcim in North America.

The stone across the street from the dock is in several large piles based on the size of the stone. Stone is quarried, then crushed in a big crusher, washed to keep down the dust and stocked by size. Underneath the stone piles are doors that open when that size stone needs to be loaded and the conveyor belts run out of  the underground up on to the overhead conveyor, across the Main Street and down into the holds of the waiting stone boats. Marblehead Quarry was once the largest in the United States, with over 2,000 acres. Over the years they have been selling off land that is no longer quarried.

Here is a recent map of when LaFarge owned the quarry before they mitigated the land east of Alexander Pike to the State of Ohio cutting down the size of the quarry by nearly 25%.