H.P. Lovecraft inherited a small mortgage on a working quarry at Manton, Dyerville, three miles west of Providence. The book Report on the Geology of Rhode Island (1887) gives its mineral deposits as being on “Manton Road, N. of Elm Farm”, with the presence of a farm suggesting it was possibly quite a rural location at the time the Lovecraft family invested in it.
In the 1920s this investment gave Lovecraft a peppercorn rent cheque of around $37 twice a year, although L. Sprague de Camp quotes a 1927 letter in which Lovecraft appears to imply that the cheques may have bounced…
“Every Feb. & Aug. the guy sends in a small cheque, but never pays up — so I’ve come to regard him as something of an institution, and feel a very proprietary interest in his rocky freehold. … I’d stand a good chance of losing my modest thou. [$1,000] if I ever had to foreclose [the mortgage].”
Although perhaps what’s meant here is that the mortgage was never ‘bought out’ with a lump-sum.
The quarry was indeed declining, as Lovecraft’s complaint about foreclosure suggests. At Lovecraft’s death, L. Sprague De Camp stated (Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers, 1976) that the quarry was valued at only $500. And in the 1971 Preface to Selected Letters III, 1929-1931, Derleth and Wandrei wrote that…
“The old family-owned stone quarry in East Providence became exhausted and the income from it came to an end.”
The Books at Brown special Lovecraft issue (1991) noted that Lovecraft visited in 1927 when he…
“delighted in showing his friends over the small Providence quarry operated by the De Magistris”
The quarry was run by an Italian manager Mariano de Magistris, and his Americanized sons one of whom owned a roadster car. The name of their business was the Providence Crushed Stone & Sand Co., located at Violet Hill, Manton Ave. (A photo of the Crushed Stone Co’s trucks circa 1914 can be purchased here).
C.E. Miller’s Rhode Island Minerals and Their Locations (1971) describes the quarry thus…
“Providence: Manton or Violet Hill Quarry. This quarry, formerly operated by the Providence Crushed Stone and Sand Company, is one of Rhode Island’s famous mineral hunting grounds of the past…”
This “is” might appear to imply it was still accessible to mineralogists in the 1970s, but another book by Miller suggests it was then long closed as a working quarry. Miller’s Minerals of Rhode Island (1972) lists it as…
“A ‘bluestone’ quarry located at Manton near Providence. Closed 1941. George English described the foliated talc from here as the best in the USA.”
Other names for it appear to have been Manton Quarry, Manton Avenue Quarry, and Violet Hill Quarry. The American Mineralogist journal described it as being a pit quarry…
“geologically speaking, of a very complex nature. At Manton a quarry is located the rock of which is used for road material. Inasmuch as quarrying operations have produced a pit the geological and mineralogical problems can therefore be studied in considerable detail. […] With the continuance of the [quarry] operations minerals new to the area have been uncovered”.
The American Mineralogist journal (Volume 11, 1926, pp. 334-340) gave a complete list of the minerals found there, to which I have appended a slightly later published list of new finds (Volume 13, 1930, pp. 496-498) as the quarry was dug deeper…
For Titanite the quarry was… “Excellent – world class for species…”. The quarry certainly seems to have been a fine mineral resource all round, many of them quite unusual or attractive — one wonders if today it might have given Lovecraft an income in the mail-order sale of small polished samples.
Lovecraft’s friend James F. Morton used the quarry to get some of the fine mineral samples used for his outstanding Paterson Museum collection (Books at Brown Lovecraft special issue, 1991). One sample taken was an unknown ultra-heavy mineral, which Morton promised to try to identify for the curious de Magistris (and which one of Lovecraft’s letters later reminded Morton about). Some of the mineral types found there seem distinctly Lovecraftian in appearance. This is Stilbite, for instance (not on the above list, but found at Manton)…
The quarry was “easily reached by the Manton Ave. trolley car”, noted the American Mineralogist journal in 1920, and was located on “Cortez St. and Manton Ave.”. The mention of “Cortez St.” makes it easy to locate on Google Earth. It appears the quarry has today been landfilled and new apartments recently built on it…
Are there any connections with the fiction? Probably not in terms of a location used in Lovecraft’s fiction — but there is a “Joel Manton” in Lovecraft’s story “The Unnamable” (1923). Possibly this was a name Lovecraft chose because of his linkages with Manton — where there was also a Lovecraft “ancestral shrine” in the form of “the Thomas Clemence house beyond the village of Manton”, which Lovecraft had always heard about but which he only visited in 1933 (Selected Letters IV, page 288). Interestingly, though, when the fictional Manton is called upon to describe “the unnameable” he describes it as a “pit”…
“It was the pit — the maelstrom — the ultimate abomination.”
