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Message:: [QUOTE="Jeff Drum, post: 1560176, member: 6444"]Ho hum, it is a shame you can't answer me without being so snide. Maybe someday? Once again, though, you missed MY POINT. I assume you know enough about slate production to know that there is not a special quarry used for the ROOFING INDUSTRY. Once you have made the effort to put a quarry into production you process the same slate into the thickness and size you want, whether roofing slate or table tops. But setting up a slate quarry and processing is not going to be a priority in the first N years of a country's existence, especially when you have a ready source for it from somewhere else (europe) so you don't need to do all that production (back when this was all being done by hand without machines). Clearly, from a market point of view, if it is worth the cost per pound to ship roofing slates from England to the colonies, then it will be worth the cost per pound to ship higher margin slate table tops. The National Park Service, which I take to be a pretty reliable source, states that: "Slate quarrying was not common in the United States until the latter half of the nineteenth century ... In the early colonial period, nearly all roofing slate was imported from North Wales. It was not until 1785 that the first commercial slate quarry was opened in the United States, by William Docher in Peach Bottom Township, Pennsylvania."[/QUOTE]