The Slate Industry Room

The Slate Room exhibits many types of slate products from the last 150 years; some of them were made for this building, which was constructed during the golden age of slate manufacturing. Slate has been used as a roofing material in Europe for a thousand years. In the mid-nineteenth century, it became popular in America. There are individual shingles on display from both the Slate Belt and international quarries. Visitors can look out the window of the Heritage Center and see especially good examples of roofing slate on the former Eisenhart’s drugstore building located on the corner of First and Market streets. The curved, graduated shingles on the cupola, built around 1890, are from William Blake’s Quarry near Roseto.

Visitors can see excellent examples of decorative, marbleized slate in the fireplace mantles in adjacent rooms made for this building around 1907, most likely by the Keenan structural slate mills in Bangor. A slate mantle can be found in the Welsh Room which formerly was the fire company meeting room. In 1908, mantles such as this were given as prizes during a local Four County Firemen’s Parade. The alarm room and restroom near the Slate Room have examples of structural slate that are also original to the building. “Structural slate” consisted of polished but undecorated slabs of slate used for variety of functional objects. The floor of the Slate Room is made of contemporary slate tiles that were donated to the Heritage Center by Dally’s Quarry in Pen Argyl.