Wall Stone - Natural - Pennsylvania

Dimensions: Irregular sizes, thickness indicated in drop down. Need to see more photos? Check out our wall stone gallery here.

Bluestone

American bluestone is a feldspathic sandstone, which is produced by about 150 mostly small quarries in adjacent areas of Pennsylvania and New York. The Pennsylvania Bluestone Association has 105 members, the vast majority of them quarrier’s.

Bluestone from Pennsylvania and New York is commercially known as bluestone or Pennsylvania Bluestone. These are a group of sandstones defined as feldspathic greywacke. The sand-sized grains from which bluestone is constituted were deposited in the “Catskill Delta” during the Middle to Upper Devonian Period of the Paleozoic Era, approximately 370 to 345 million years ago. If the initial deposit was made under slow moving water the ripples of the water action on the sand or mud will be revealed. This deposition process may be seen today at any ocean beach in shallow water or in a stream bed where conditions allow it to be observed. The term “bluestone” is derived from a deep-blue-colored sandstone first found in Ulster County, NY.

The Catskill Delta was created from run off from the Arcadian Mountains (“Ancestral Appalachians”) which covered the area where New York City now exists. This Delta ran in a narrow band from southwest to northeast and today provides the base material for the high-quality bluestone which is quarried from the Catskills (and Northeast Pennsylvania).

As the product became more popular as an architectural and building stone and demand grew, quarrying for it spread throughout south central New York and northeast Pennsylvania. It is a unique commodity of particular value to the economy of Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania.

This bluestone is made into products as follows: The bluestone is separated from the rock (quarry face) in the quarry by parallel cuts with saws with diamond-tipped blades into large rectangular blocks. Sometimes the stone is lightly blasted to encourage splitting along parallel planes of weakness, delineating the top and bottom of the block. The final products are often made in the quarry, but sometimes massive blocks are trucked to “saw shops” to be finished there, by sawing, by “snapping” or breaking the stone with a guillotine along a line of pressure points, or by splitting along planes of
weakness.

The largest volume product is ordinary irregularly-edged flagstone, followed by ashlar. Flagstone belongs to a group of products that require no (or very little) sawing, such as rubble masonry and landscape stone. Two other product groups are classified as Architectural Stone, one group that requires some sawing or “snapping” such as paving stone, wall stone, ashlar, bridge stone, and curbing, and the other group that requires sawing on all surfaces, such as counter tops, stair treads, lintels, thresholds, ashlar, sidewalks, and residential walls (veneer). The ashlar can be sawn on all six surfaces, or “snapped” on one or more surfaces with the remaining surfaces sawn.

Fieldstone

Shipping costs are shown in your shopping cart after you've answered the shipping questions and entered your zip code. These rates are subsidized (discounted). If you are ordering over 10 tons, your shipment will require a flatbed truck and you will require a forklift or skid steer large enough to remove the stones from the truck. If you don't have access to a skidsteer, you can easily rent one from your local hardware store by the hour. If less than 10 tons, we will ship via LTL and the stones will be removed for you via a pallet jack.

As for returns, given the nature of stones, they are not returnable or refundable unless they are damaged during shipping.