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This would have been a great image to use in Property and Progress--what a great scene of an industry in the Vermont mountains?  Goes really well with Leo Marx' The Machine in the Garden.  Or--to draw upon his insight for legal history--what I'm beginning to call the law in the garden.  (This image has a distant parallel with Mark DeWolf Howe's important book on church and state in America, The Garden and the Wilderness.)

There's a whole article (or perhaps student note?) to be written on marble quarries in the antebellum era--a nice part of the growing monument law genre, no doubt--stuff about shipping rough and cut marble; specific performance of leases to mine marble.  Oh, the list of topics goes on and on.  All a nice part of the story of how American property law dealt with Americans' use of nature's bounties.

One of these days (years?) I'm going to go back to Durand's Progress and write an essay about "The Law of Progress," which links the images in the landscape with cases from the era--but perhaps I'll start that project with the law of the quarry.

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