WELLINGTON DIMENSION STONE COLLECTION AT THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY: A RARE EXAMPLE OF A WELL-DOCUMENTED COLLECTION OF 20TH CENTURY DIMENSION STONES

The Department of Mineralogy at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History houses the Wellington Dimension Stone Collection that contains just over 1,200 slabs of granite, diabase, gabbro, slate, phyllite, marble, limestone, serpentine, travertine, and schists. There are 533 different slabs, some with multiple samples that show different polished, honed and flame-etched surfaces, and a range of available colors and patterns. Robert E. Wellington was an engineer and sales representative of the Alberene Stone Company. A year after his death in 1987, the Museum acquired his entire collection of papers and 1,137 sales samples. He was involved in the construction of over a thousand buildings spanning a two decade period between 1967 and 1987. He sold products from several stone companies including Georgia Marble, Green Mountain Marble, Tennessee Marble, Alabama Limestone, Carthage Marble Corp., Georgia Granite Co., Vermont Structural Slate Co., The Structural Slate Co., and Natural Slate Blackboard Co. His accounts covered hundreds of orders from personal residences to Corporate Headquarters (e.g. Goodyear Tire, Procter & Gamble), as well as churches, museums, hospitals, fire stations, city halls, universities, high schools, restaurants, and cemeteries. Most of these buildings are located across Ohio, but include others in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia, Kentucky, Delaware, and Texas. This collection is a significant resource for Historical Preservation, in addition to Economic Geology, because it also contains the bills of sale and stone installation diagrams for nearly every building for which he sold material. These sheets list dates of installation, dimension stone names, number of panels, and even notes on their installation. The collection is also unique in that it is one of only a few surviving major collections available for research in the United States. Already scanned in high resolution on a flatbed scanner, we are preparing to put these images online as a searchable internet database with images and both trade names and geologic names. Eventually we will have digital copies of the building data and a thin section made to accompany each sample. The collection is available at the Museum for viewing by researchers (academic and industry alike) who wish to use it.