How do they make slate?
In olden times the children doodled their pictures and wrote their school notes on flat slabs of slate. The classroom blackboard was a large slab of slate stuck on the wall. Nowadays our blackboards and bulletin boards, our scratch pads and note books are created from assorted man made materials. Today We can buy man made flag stones and floor coverings that copy the beauty of natural slate. But real slate stone is made by Mother Nature, and the job takes millions of years. Our deposits are not very plentiful, and hard, smooth slate is an expensive building stone. Millions of years ago, slate making in the earth’s crust began in Pennsylvania and Vermont, in Maine and Maryland. Slate is classed as a metamorphic rock which means that it has been remade from some other rocky mineral. Its story began in the ancient past, and for millions of years the deposit was merely a layer of oozy mud. The silty layer may have been dropped fragment by dirty fragment in a flooded valley. It may have bee
