The Geometry of Stone: A ROM Geologist's Search for the Museum's Origins
Ellis, Glen, ROM Magazine
At the centre of the marble floor in the ROM's 1933 Rotunda a variegated star, cut from sodalite, lies within successively larger starburst patterns. The patterns radiate outward to mosaics of animals, some from mythology, others from the natural world. Marble columns further define the space. The sodalite and marble were quarried from approximately 1.3-billion-year-old Precambrian deposits near Bancroft, Ontario. The original ROM (1914, Philosophers' Walk Wing), built north-south from Bloor Street along the Taddle Creek ravine, is fashioned from yellow bricks produced in the Don Valley. The brickworks there first used clay from the bottom of the glacial Lake Iroquois of 13,000 years ago, to make red and yellow bricks, and later accessed the 420-million-year-old grey shale beneath it, which was dyed to make bricks in a variety of colours. The historic ROM arose from Ontario's geology. ROM geologist Vince Vertolli is an authority on both.
In the course of his research, Vertolli has gone to the sources. At the Princess Quarry (see map), he found the sodalite deposit that furnished the centrepiece of the Rotunda floor. A circa 1930 sell sheet from the Bancroft quarries references a rainbow of available marble colours and patterns, from "Laurentian Buff" to "Rose Fantasia." The buff-coloured marble in the Rotunda comes from the McMillan and Stewart quarries, the green and the pink brecciated mostly from the Barker Quarry. The Rotunda columns, cut from "Green Serpentine" marble, were turned on a lathe at the quarry, then finessed and polished in Toronto.
Vertolli points out the quarry sites on Ontario geological maps of the region, most of which he and ROM colleague Syd Lumbers researched and created over a period of 20 years: "We mapped a swath of the Canadian Shield," he says, "from the Renfrew/Pembroke vicinity to the islands of Georgian Bay." This involved field-based research in the summers and lab work the rest of the year. Because the region isn't rich in precious metals and minerals, much of it had never been geologically mapped. "Our maps, about 30 in all, were the first comprehensive surveys of the region. …