Poked around the old quarry site a bit more when I visited Arms Forest on Monday. I’ve visited here before, a couple of times last year. It seems the quarry may have been cut into an ancient sacred site, perhaps on purpose.
The city's website claims this quarry was used commercially in the 19th century for a brief period, and that some said its stone was used to build the Ethan Allen Tower up the road, back at the beginning of the 20th Century. But I don't believe this is correct.
Instead, given its location next to, or even on, the Episcopal Church's Rock Point property, and given the vast amount of stone left strewn about, this is more likely the quarry John Henry Hopkins, Burlington's first Episcopal Bishop, started just before he died, to quarry stone for a girl's school to be built at Rock Point.
Hopkins' son John Henry Hopkins Jr. wrote a biography of his father (he also wrote "We Three Kings" ...but I digress), in which he describes the quarry:
"During the last year of my Father's life, he set the quarrymen to work, and quarried out a large quantity of stone near a site on the Church Farm where he had finally determined to place the girls' school : but he never saw even the corner-stone laid; and the quarried heaps have slept undisturbed since his departure." (P. 318 in The Life of the Late Right Reverend John Henry Hopkins, by John Henry Hopkins Jr.)
With its location and heaps of stone, this is that quarry.
The evidence I see above the quarry leads me to think this was a possible sacred stone site before it was quarried. And Hopkins Senior, who was also an architect and a landscape artist, as well as a Man of God as he saw fit (used the Bible to justify slavery during the Civil War, not good), likely deliberately destroyed what he, too, saw as a possible sacred — to him, heathen — space.
My esoteric side believes that in so doing, he doomed his girl's school, and later Burlington High School, built just above this site, to failure. In an odd coincidence, one of the most highly PCB contaminated parts of the BHS facility, the Tech Center, is right next to this site.
I covered this in a video last year:
This past Monday was actually my first visit back since making this “Doom” video. I was able to get into places above and atop the quarry which were overgrown by the time I was there last year. Bare trees also made it more obvious how these possible tiers of stones might have been laid out, though given the landscape-size scale, the new raw video here can’t quite capture the scope of it all. But it might give you some idea of it.
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