The town of Marble and the stone in the Lincoln Memorial

In the northern corner of Gunnison County sits a small town with a fitting name: Marble. It is not a nickname. The town exists because of the white stone in the hills above it.

Marble was founded in the 1880s to quarry the Yule marble deposit near Yule Creek and to process it at a mill in town. For a few decades, this remote valley shipped finished marble across the country. The National Park Service notes that the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., is built of Colorado Yule marble, and History Colorado records that stone from here also went into the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and many other buildings. When the marble company cut back operations, the town shrank and nearly emptied out, but it never fully disappeared.

Why this is worth knowing: a tiny mountain town quietly supplied stone for some of the nation’s most recognized monuments. The old mill site and quarry are recorded historic resources, so the ruins and stone you may see around Marble are heritage to respect rather than scrap to take.

For the documented history of the quarry and mill, History Colorado and the National Park Service’s Lincoln Memorial pages are good sources.