A soapstone quarry with Indigenous roots is set to become an archaeological park.

By Kim O’Connell

Four thousand years ago, if you were working with a stone mallet, it would be steady but relatively quick work to carve a soapstone boulder into a medium-sized bowl. With stone chipping off with every strike, you could start the project in the morning, work into the afternoon, and be boiling water in the bowl by nightfall. Soapstone was ideal that way—easy enough to carve but dense enough to hold heat.

In late 2023, Montgomery Parks, a department of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, acquired a longtime equestrian facility tucked into the watershed of the Patuxent River, a major tributary of the Chesapeake Bay. According to county park staff, archaeologists had long known that the site was the location of a soapstone quarry used by Indigenous people between 6,000 and 3,000 years ago. The department has now begun a planning process to turn the 33-acre property into a park that will interpret this history.

Also known as steatite, soapstone is a metamorphic rock that is solid but relatively soft, making it a popular material for carving into cooking vessels, tools, pipes, and other objects. The Ednor Soapstone Quarry, as the park site is known, is one of 11 such quarries that have been identified in Montgomery County, but all the others have been destroyed by development or are otherwise inaccessible. The former equestrian center, by contrast, remains mostly open space, aside from a horse barn and associated buildings that will eventually be removed.

“The landscape itself was pretty intact outside of the buildings,” says Cassandra Michaud, a cultural resources stewardship supervisor with Montgomery Parks. “It really lent itself to preservation, with interpretive value and archaeological value.”

The conceptual plan includes areas for reconstructions of Indigenous dwellings and demonstrations, an interpretive center and trails, space for K–12 school groups, and parking. A significant portion of the property will be devoted to reforestation. Next steps include community engagement and a formal design process, Michaud says. It is important to county officials that Indigenous groups be involved in the park’s development. “We’ve reached out to the Maryland Commission on Indian Affairs,” Michaud says. “We’d like to set up an advisory committee for the property that would represent these groups.”

Although future archaeological excavations are likely, Michaud says that the site is valuable to research even without digging. The quarry is thought to have drawn people from significant distances, she says. “Each of these quarries has a chemical marker, and you can perform chemical analysis from this site and source where a stone artifact is coming from,” she says. “So you can rebuild those trade networks and understand how they came about.”

Landscape architect Sheila Boudreau, the principal of SpruceLab, an Indigenous- and woman-owned practice based in Toronto and Edmonton, Alberta, has spoken about the work of decolonizing landscape architecture. At the Ednor site, she says, designers have an important opportunity to stretch their temporal understanding of landscape and invite Indigenous voices to be heard. “Landscape designs for public realm and natural heritage areas are critical opportunities to open up the design process, to invite the First Peoples of those lands to tell us how they want to tell their story, but also what values should guide these designs,” she says. “As landscape architects, we are trained to think in terms of hundreds of years. For Indigenous peoples, whose ancestors have lived on their traditional territories for over 12,000 years, this is merely a blink of an eye.”