This is Throwback Thursday #32. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc ...), please sent them to [email protected]. Thanks!
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Here are some pictures of a field trip by ESCONI juniors to a "Riverside" quarry in 1959. Unfortunately, the location for this trip was not recorded, but a little research in the newsletters of the time yielded the following announcement in the December 1959 edition of the newsletter.
So, it looks like this was a field trip to the Consumers Quarry in McCook, IL near Lemont on Saturday, November 21st, 1959. That quarry was reclaimed and is now is part of the Lemont Heritage Quarries Recreation Area. Back in the 1950's and 1960's, there were many quarries in the towns surrounding Chicago. The Chicago area was growing quickly and there was a need for building materials. Now, many of these old quarries have been recovered and live on as parks and forest preserves.
Photo of Consumers Quarry, Lemont, about 1890. Photo courtesy of the Lemont Area Historical Society.
Consumer Quarry Today
ESCONI had multiple junior groups back in the 1950's. Unfortunately, there are no old cars in these pictures, but it's interesting to see how people dressed on a field trip to a quarry back then... street clothes. No one is wearing any hard hats and are they really lounging on stones piled next to the high wall?!? Also, young children were let into the quarry. The minimum age for a quarry visit like this is 16 in our more enlightened modern time.
Since this is a hard rock limestone quarry, they most likely found the usual Silurian fossils of corals, trilobites, cephalopods, gastropods, and brachiopods with the occasional crinoid.
