Berea Rocks

Today, after my visit to NASA’s Glenn Research Center, I happened to have dinner at the Cornerstone Brewery in Berea, Ohio, a small suburb of Cleveland. As I strolled around the lake that dominates the town, I stumbled on Berea’s claim to international fame. For over 80 years some of the finest grindstones of the world were exported from Berea. These fine grindstones were cut from the sandstone quarries of Berea. The quarries are now gone and I was standing at the edge of the lake formed by filling one of these quarries. The Rocky River that runs by Berea with flat rocks carelessly strewn across the river bed stands evidence to the monstrous glacial action on the underlying sandstone crust (see picture). As I gazed across the lake, my mind’s eye conjured up images of factory earth performing the immense operations of compaction of the deposits from Lake Erie 300 million years ago to create the gritty sandstone bed on which Berea’s fame was founded.