McMillan's Stone Mill
McMillan's Stone Mill, Bloomington, Indiana
The McMillan Mill was built during 1926 but later that year was one of the many companies that merged to form the Indiana Limestone Company. This mill became the newest and one of the biggest of the new company's mills. It is located on the west side of old Highway 37 between Bedford and Oolitic, about three thousand feet north of First Street on the old highway.
P. M. & B. Quarry
P. M. & B. Quarry, Bedford, Indiana
Natural stone step - P. M. & B. Quarry, Bedford, Indiana
Scabbling Machines, P. M. & B. Stone Company, Bedford, Indiana
Scabbling is the process of roughly dressing stone prior to it being fine cut.
The P. M. & B. quarry is owned by the Indiana Limestone Company. It was from this quarry that limestone was extracted from the "Empire Hole" to provide the limestone for the Empire State Building which was opened in 1931. The "Empire Hole" was also the source of the limestone for the building's major 2001 renovations.
P. M. & B. refers to the Perry, Matthews, and Buskirk Stone Company. The company was founded by Captain Gilbert K. Perry of Ellettsville; Fred Matthews of Bloomington; W. N. Matthews of Bedford and Philip Kearney Buskirk of Bloomington in 1889. They opened the Horseshoe quarry which proved to be the most valuable stone property in the Oolitic belt on 240 acres of land at Bluff Ridge, 5 miles north of Bedford.. They had put all of their capital into the company and would have gone bankrupt if the company had failed. The limestone lay in a bed 50ft thick.
By 1896, they were operating 10 channel machines, 6 derricks, 4 drills and 3 pumps, all operated by steam and were extracting 700,000 cubic feet of stone per year. In one month they could extract 85,000 feet.
They later sold the quarry for $600,000. When he died in 1907, Buskirk was the only survivor of the original four founders.
In 1910, the P. M. and B. merged with Bedford Quarries Company which had been formed in 1893 and the company renamed to Indiana Quarries Company.
A detailed description of the quarry appears on pages 411 - 419 of the 32nd Report by Indiana. Dept. of Geology and Natural Resources, Indiana. Dept. of Statistics and Geology. See also History of the Lawrence and Monroe Counties, Indiana - by B. F. Bowen & Co., 1914 and Philip Kearney Buskirk (Internet Archive).