Bench marks and stone dressing
File:Tailleur de pierre.jpg on Wikimedia Commons, used under a Creative Commons licence. Caption reflects quarry terminology rather than a named supplier.
Split beds and axe facets
Traditional masonry prose distinguishes faces produced along sedimentary bedding from faces opened across joints. A freshly split limestone slab commonly carries curved chatter along bedding traces; hand-pointed limestone shows nested arcs where short blows chased hardness seams. Sandstone split parallel to bedding tends toward planar shimmer under grazing light, whereas percussion across bedding yields darker fracture planes better suited to rustication sketches.
Banker vocabulary
In drafting-room speech the banker is the staging slab where small ashlar is squared after rough splitting. Field inspectors rarely see an intact banker in situ today; however historic specifications frequently cite banker tolerances when ashlar width tolerances appear tighter than rubble tolerances. Photographs showing stacked banker stones beside scaffolding anchors therefore deserve caption tags referencing scaffold schedules rather than quarry invoice dates unless invoices appear on the same sheet.
Reading archive prints
Historic quarry literature archived through museum repositories often reproduces halftone plates where hammer scale disappears. When comparing a halftone plate with later conservation drawings, prefer calibrated rulers embedded in the newer drawing rather than inferred mortar widths from microfilm zoom alone.
Cross-links
For province-scale placement of industrial quarries, continue to Canadian dimension-stone belts. For map-scale pit edges and drown lines, read Quarry sites and heritage records. The stone masonry article on English Wikipedia provides a stable glossary for coursing terms, while the National Trust for Canada lists current telephone contact for built-heritage questions in Ottawa.