Earthcaches have no "box" to find. Rather, with this earthcache, you discover something about geology. For more information, see earthcache.org.
Parking at Duke can be tricky, especially on weekdays. The pay parking garage that serves Duke Chapel is at 125 Science Drive near the Bryan Center.
Supposedly after Princeton rejected James B. Duke’s $6 million gift (because it came with the stipulation that the institution be renamed after the Duke family), Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina gladly accepted the $6 million gift. This gift meant more space for the college, so plans were drawn up to construct another campus, West Campus, on a hilly, forested tract to the west of Trinity’s original campus, East Campus.
Mr. Duke wanted that Princeton look and feel for his new campus. Princeton is constructed of “Princeton stone,” a specific form of granite found only in New Jersey. But his building team found that transporting Princeton stone from quarries several states away was expensive, so James B. Duke tasked university leaders with finding a more reasonable alternative. Enter Hillsborough Stone.
The building team found a 72-acre farm in Hillsborough that was in close proximity to a railway line that supplied what is now known as Duke Stone or Hillsborough Stone. It was much cheaper at $3.55 a ton, including delivery, versus the $15.05 a ton for one of the test panels of “Princeton Stone.”
This quiet quarry in a far-flung corner of Duke Forest is the only place that supplies the building stone used in roughly 100 buildings and campus walls across Duke University and Duke University Health System. And it only supplies stones to Duke.
Duke’s quarry in Orange County sits on the eastern edge of the Carolina Slate Belt. The Carolina Slate Belt refers to a region of low-grade metamorphosed volcanic rock characterized by slaty cleavages. The Belt is made up of metamorphic volcanic rock and metasedimentary rocks extending approximately 375 miles North-to-South in a string of volcanic hills and mountains ranging from Virginia to Georgia. This region is one of several belts crossing North Carolina in a general southwest to northeast direction.
The quarry’s stone was formed by volcanic debris that were changed considerably by heat and pressure and stained by weathering. The stones are at least 400 million years old. Over time, consolidation and metamorphism led to the rock taking on characteristics of slate, leaving it streaked with irregular seams. This means the stone has the combination of being both strong and unpredictably brittle.
Duke stone has 24 distinct colors: 7 primary colors and 17 distinct variants of the primary colors, from rust orange to slate gray.
As West Campus was built in the 1930s, the best stones were saved for Duke University Chapel, the last building to be erected on West Campus.
Logging Tasks: (Required)
Please send your answers via geocaching message center (preferred) or email.
- What type of stone is Duke Stone? Igneous, metamorphic, or sedimentary?
- How many colors does Duke Stone come in?
- How many and which primary and variant colors you can see in the stone at the posted coordinates?
- Who was the superintendent of the Hillsborough quarry who quarried the stones for the original buildings of West Campus?
- Please post a picture in your found it log of you/part of you/your avatar with Duke stone.
References