State of Arkansas - National Parks Gallery
Summary
Name: Arkansas
Level: 30-ft.
Donor: State of Arkansas
Dates: 1850/1850
Original material: limestone
Dimensions: 2' x 4'
Sculptor/Carver: not known
Original inscription: Arkansas
Documented material history:
• 1849-50: In 1834 [sic] [Peter Beller], with the three Harp brothers, was commissioned to quarry a block of marble, six feet long, four feet wide and two feet thick for inclusion in the famed monument to the father of our country then being erected in the nation’s
capitol. It was a difficult, tedious and time-consuming task in those days when quarrying had to be done with hand drills and wedges. . . . The huge block of marble was eventually broken loose from Marble Mountain [near the town of Marble Falls]. Weighing about a ton, it was loaded onto a heavy sledge or stone-boat and skidded and hauled by a team of twenty oxen over the rough country of the Ozark and Boston mountains, a distance of about 50 miles, to the Arkansas River where it was shipped by barge to New Orleans and eventually shipped to DC.
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