A Day Out at the Slate Valley Museum

When it comes to local museums, there are a few in the town my grandparents live in. When I was a kid, I never took the time to really explore them or learn much when it came to being outside of school. Now that I am older, and appreciate the museums that I go too, I wanted to go to the Slate Valley Museum right in the middle of the town. There are tons of signs around, which declare Granville as the slate capitol of the world, so I did want to know exactly what made this small town a popular place when it come to an export as simple as slate.

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Much like all the museums in a small town, the Slate Valley Museum is on the smaller side, but packed with local information, history, and general knowledge around slate itself. As it turns out, you can find six different colors of slate produced in this area; there are three types of grey ranging from a light blue-grey to a darker navy gray, a beautiful purple, a purple and blue mix and a vibrant red. This is actually really rare in the world – having all of the colors occur naturally is what made this area stand out amongst the world. This, paired with the massive amount of slate quarries that popped up in the area and around the Vermont and New York boarder, actually brought a lot of history to this small town.

Many different immigrants from all over the world have come to this area, specifically looking for work in the slate quarries. The Slate Valley Museum did a great job of showcasing different groups of immigrants, talking about their culture, how they blended within the area, and around what time period they were most prevalent in slate quarries. It was interesting to read how their customs adapted around ours and about different owners of quarries and how they reacted. Along with this expansive area f the museum, there was a smaller area dedicated to the different tools that were used in quarries.

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From big trucks to different types of pullies, it was quite interesting to see the scale of some of this in real life. There was this giant, metal thing that would go out on rope wires, which would lift massive amounts of slate over worker’s heads and out of the pit. This looked extremely dangerous and quite scary – and as it turns out it really was. You see, I went along to the museum with my grandfather, who we called taid (I am told it’s Welsh, as his grandfather was an immigrant from Wales). He was super interested in a video presentation that there was, running in the museum, and actually asked the museum director if she could restart it and to make the projector work properly as it wasn’t fully on when we came in. He sat down, and whispered that his own taid had owned a slate quarry in the area, and that his life was in the video.

I had not known this at all, when I was a kid, taid didn’t really talk much – he worked a lot and was a quite man. So it was really interesting to see him get excited about the Slate Valley Museum, and he spoke about how dangerous it was working there, how big the slabs were, and how hard his own grandfather worked. I found it really interesting – especially paired with the video which had images from the local area and interviews from slate workers which continued to talk about how often people lost limbs, how there was no workers comp and how hard it was generally. As it turns out, 95% of each bit of slate is actually “waste” product, so a lot of the outside of the quarry was literally just waste, creating large piles that look almost comical.

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Along with the above different sections of the museum, there was a small out cove which showcased a blacksmith’s shop – which would have made many of the tools needed to mine and shape slate, as well as another outcome which showed modern tools for punching holes in slate, cutting slate, and even putting up slate tiles on roofs (the most common use for slate nearby). Another small, very recent section of the museum showcased slate in action – showing off the uses of slate from the different shapes tiles can be, to carving them and painting on them. There was even a box of different versions of ground slate, showing off other uses, especially for waste! It’s really interesting to see the different uses for slate in the modern day and age.

We had a really lovely time at the Slate Valley Museum, which does a good job of showing off local history and making sure that people in the area really can learn about slate and all that it has brought to this town.

You can check out our other Days Out to see what else we’ve been up too!