page_title: Yule Marble
section_title: Primary quarry: 1905 to today
hierarchical_section_title: Yule Marble / Primary quarry: 1905 to today
caption_attribution_description: English: 1906 approx.,west side of Yule Creek Valley, south of Marble Colorado. On the mountain side is the developing Yule Marble quarry of the Colorado Yule Marble Company, at 9,500 feet above sea level. A 4,500 foot seam of white marble is visible
context_page_description: Yule Marble is a marble of metamorphosed limestone found only in the Yule Creek Valley, in the West Elk Mountains of Colorado, 2.8 miles southeast of the town of Marble, Colorado. First discovered in 1873, it is quarried underground at an elevation of 9,300 feet above sea level—in contrast to most marble, which is quarried from an open pit and at much lower elevations.
  The localized geology created a marble that is 99.5% pure calcite, with a grain structure that gives a smooth texture, a homogeneous look, and a luminous surface. It is these qualities for which it was selected to clad the exterior of the Lincoln Memorial and a variety of other buildings throughout the United States, in spite of being more expensive than other marbles. The size of the deposits enables large blocks to be quarried, which is why the marble for the Tomb of the Unknowns, with its 56-long-ton die block, was quarried from Yule Marble.
  Yule's quality comes at a high price due to the cost of quarrying in a high-altitude mountain environment.
context_section_description: When the Colorado-Yule Marble Company (CYMC) arrived in Marble in 1905 they developed the last Yule Marble quarry, which is still in production today. The operation showed the unrealized promise of the previous 20 years with a 10-year boom in which marble was shipped to the east and west coasts with contracts reaching one million dollars. The marble boom also resulted in one for the town of Marble. While the CYMC overcame some quarry problems of the previous 20 years, other difficulties ultimately led to their bankruptcy in April 1917. Subsequent operations from 1922 through 1941 were on a much smaller scale with several different operators and dramatic fluctuations in quarrying until the next bust at the end of 1941 After almost 50 years the quarry reopened in September 1990. The 1905 problems of transporting marble out of the town have been largely solved (by road and trucks) but the high costs of working in a mountain environment still exist today, and there have been several operator changes with the last one in 2010.
caption: 1907: Looking east at the CYMC quarry, west side of Yule Creek. Visible is the marble vein over one mile (1.6 km) wide with thickness of 169 feet (52 m)169 to 239 feet (73 m).
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