Farm Fresh Rhode Island, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable agriculture, was testing the soil for its new home in Providence’s Valley neighborhood a few years ago when it unearthed a lot of marble.
“We went 12 feet down and this is when we discovered marble,” recalled Lucie Searle, community and real estate developer for Farm Fresh. “And we’re like, ‘where did this come from?’ ”
The group started delving into why marble was buried beneath the nonprofit’s future home at Kinsley and Sims avenues.
It turned out that the world-renowned architects of the Statehouse, McKim, Mead and White, selected a Worcester firm, Norcross Brothers, to construct the seat of state government more than a century ago.
“And the Norcross Brothers built in Providence, in the Valley neighborhood, on the site that Farm Fresh owns today — the exact 3.2 acre site — they built a state-of-the art cutting facility,” Searle said. “And here all of the marble that went into the Statehouse was cut.”
An 1898 newspaper account cites how the stone-cutting plant’s size and scale enabled enough progress not just to satisfy a commission overseeing Statehouse construction, but also “the fastidious tastes of the general public of Rhode Island as well.”
It was a time when the Ocean State was prosperous and Providence was a hive of industry.
So how did leftover marble wind up underground and forgotten for more than 100 years?
“As we’ve researched this, what we learned is that you have very, very big blocks coming up [by rail] from Georgia and these were cut to the architects’ specifications,” Searle said. “And there were pieces that were discarded, because they weren’t usable or maybe they made a mistake. And so it was very common to just put things in the ground, and this is what people did.”
Over time, new buildings covered the former stone-cutting yard. Then, a 2015 fire wiped out those buildings.
Farm Fresh acquired the property two years later, began digging into the foundation and found the marble.
“So we decided to have our contractor save any piece of marble that was 20 inches or more in any dimension and he did,” Searle said, “and we have tons of marble.”
The tons of marble include pieces as long as four feet — suitable for a bench or a landscape feature — while other remnants are as small as half a pound, just right for a paperweight.
Dave Allyn is one of five artists who answered a call to embellish some of the marble pieces with a design. His Sims Avenue studio is a stone’s throw from Farm Fresh Rhode Island. Allyn used screen printing to etch images of the construction of the Statehouse onto some of the smaller marble pieces.
As he explained, “I’ve been able to adaptively reuse these artifacts and do some historical imagery on the top of them with screen printing and then mount them onto a steel base and basically turn these into a piece of art.”
Rhode Island is known for its checkered political history, a lot of that connected with the Statehouse.
As Lucie Searle noted, the Capitol is also a grand structure that has withstood the test of time, suggesting endurance, ambition and an ability to punch above our weight.
“It’s a building that makes a statement,” she said. “We’re the smallest state, but it’s saying, ‘look at me.’ ”
Farm Fresh plans to offer the rediscovered marble during a public sale from June 9 to June 11, with most pieces selling from $5 to $500, and the proceeds going to the nonprofit. More details are available online at FarmFreshRI.org
Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis@ripr.org
