THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - At the Mills Mansion 6 A Statue of Limestone

CATSKILL - The Mills Mansion offers tours of their grounds from time to time, and we have sometimes gone along. When you get down to the southwest corner of the estate they like to point here and there and relate how once, long ago, there were statues located in this vicinity. These are all gone now and were probably put into storage. We are not sure how many there once were but there is at least one statue left. It’s a short distance northeast of the mansion. That’s one that we are told is entitled “Diana, Goddess of the Hunt.” See our first photo. We have a few doubts about that. Statues of Diana are very commonplace and typically she is portrayed with a bow and arrow. This one does have a quiver of arrows, but she has a pitcher in one hand and is petting a dog with the other. Hunters don’t commonly carry pitchers or stop to pet dogs. But let’s assume that the title is accurate. That’s nice but it doesn’t make the story all that much better. You see, there is no record of who the sculptor was or even when it was carved. There is an inscription on its front, but we couldn’t read it. We can guess that the Mills family installed the statue, but when was that? It’s such a shame that we don’t know more.

So, we are hoping that we can fill in some of the blanks. The very first thing that we noticed is that this Diana is composed of limestone. That should have been an easy call for us, but this is an old statue, and it is encrusted with algae, moss and lichens. There is, however, enough bare stone to make a reliable ID. So, we had just started, and we were now one for one. But exactly what limestone was this? We were hoping it would be the famous Indiana Limestone. That’s a stone, famed for its beautiful, evenly white texture. It’s composed of uniformly fine-grained bits of ground up fossil shells. Sculptors love this stone; it carves well, and it has been used to turn out great looking statuary for ages. But – no; we searched Diana’s surface and found a few horizons rich in fossil shells. They show up in cross section, especially near the bottom of Diana’s pedestal. See our second photo. The Indiana Limestone does not display such fossils. Now we had dropped down to one for two.

We wondered what the age of this mysterious limestone was in the geological time scale but could not tell. If we could put some names on some of those fossils then we might well determine its precise antiquity. But none of them can be identified so we can’t figure out its age. Now we were one for three. We had tried but had not added much to the knowledge of this old statue. Again, what a shame. Maybe we could do better if we could see those other statues.

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