Billmeyer Limestone Quarry
Updated September 2015 | By Matthew Christopher
The Billmeyer Limestone Quarry (Bainbridge, PA) was a fantastic network of enormous pipes and kilns that once supplied area farmers with lime and provided dolomite to steel mills. The quarry flooded in 1961 and operations ceased; in 1983 the flooded quarry was opened for use by Scuba divers. Several divers have died in the quarry over the years, mainly due to errors in judgment - one article relates the story of an arterial embolism caused by ascending to the surface too quickly - and in the background, the remains of the enormous quarry buildings rusted away until they were demolished some time in 2007.
After hearing about the Billmeyer Quarry, I convinced my girlfriend at the time to join me on a trip to check it out. It was a foggy and rainy morning and I was worried once we got there that the weather would not be cooperative since there was some distance between the buildings. Once we were in a few of the decaying steel structures however, the weather cleared a bit and the surprising depth to the property revealed itself - huge kilns and pipes much larger than I am spanned the main building, and old documents from the 1930s littered the floors in the offices. It was a pretty fantastic day overall, and as we walked back down the train tracks to the car with the sun setting and a light mist over the rails, I was excited about what I had just found. My next visit, three months later, was in the middle of demolition. I still found some interesting outbuildings but I was disappointed that I hadn't returned earlier.
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The Billmeyer Limestone Quarry (Bainbridge, PA) was a fantastic network of enormous pipes and kilns that once supplied area farmers with lime and provided dolomite to steel mills. The quarry flooded in 1961 and operations ceased; in 1983 the flooded quarry was opened for use by Scuba divers. Several divers have died in the quarry over the years, mainly due to errors in judgment - one article relates the story of an arterial embolism caused by ascending to the surface too quickly - and in the background, the remains of the enormous quarry buildings rusted away until they were demolished some time in 2007.
After hearing about the Billmeyer Quarry, I convinced my girlfriend at the time to join me on a trip to check it out. It was a foggy and rainy morning and I was worried once we got there that the weather would not be cooperative since there was some distance between the buildings. Once we were in a few of the decaying steel structures however, the weather cleared a bit and the surprising depth to the property revealed itself - huge kilns and pipes much larger than I am spanned the main building, and old documents from the 1930s littered the floors in the offices. It was a pretty fantastic day overall, and as we walked back down the train tracks to the car with the sun setting and a light mist over the rails, I was excited about what I had just found. My next visit, three months later, was in the middle of demolition. I still found some interesting outbuildings but I was disappointed that I hadn't returned earlier.
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