Culpeper Plant
18244 Germanna Highway
Culpeper, Virginia 22701-9639
Monday - Friday
7:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Culpeper Plant
Located on Route 3 just southeast of Culpeper, Virginia , the Culpeper plant was acquired on May 4, 2002. Several things make this plant unique, including the dinosaur tracks that are located on-site, and displayed at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.. With its special reddish color, products from this plant are shipped to many surrounding states.
The counties of Culpeper, Louisa, Fauquier, and Spotsylvania.
The rock in the Culpeper quarry is sedimentary siltstone, sandstone and shale. The majority rock type is siltstone, which can grade down in particle size to shale and up to fine-grained sandstone. The sediments making up this rock were eroded from uplands to the west and deposited in a low lying basin that was forming as a result of continental land masses pulling apart. Many of these basins formed from Late Triassic into Jurassic time, but the quarry is located in the largest such basin in Virginia- the Culpeper Basin. Rivers and streams running into this lowland created a shallow sea with wetlands in which sediments spread out and deposited over a broad area. This is why the rock in the quarry is a mostly uniform texture. Deposition of the sediments was taking place about 200 million years ago. As deposition continued and sediment thickness increased, the lower sediments gradually became hardened into rock under weight and pressure. The reddish color in the lower parts of the quarry resulted from the hematite-cementing agent that bound the sediment grains into rock. Upper parts of the quarry are a gray color where a lack of oxygen in the depositional kept the cementing agent from becoming a reddish color. In addition, later intrusions of diabase rock nearby in the Culpeper Basin pushed up the rock strata in the quarry to a gentle inclination. The quarry floors are mined along the formation’s bedding planes at this angle instead of being flat as they are at our other quarries.
Safety Data Sheet: Shale