The Stone That Helped Build the Midwest

You could drive past the Hurstville Lime Kilns, file them away as interesting stone structures beside the road, and keep going. I almost did.

Stop and walk closer, though, and a whole working landscape starts to appear.

What they were

The fires are gone, but the story isn’t

These kilns once turned local limestone into lime for mortar. That lime helped hold together the masonry of a growing region, linking a Jackson County operation to buildings far beyond the county line.

Today the fires are out, but the structures are still standing. They give you a place to think about the labor and raw material behind something as ordinary as a brick wall. I’ll never look at mortar the same way.

The work

Picture the place in motion

Alfred Hurst started the operation in the 1800s, building the first draw kiln in 1871. Three more followed.

Making lime meant quarrying stone, hauling it to the kilns, feeding the fires and getting the finished product ready to ship. Wood supplied the heat. Workers kept the whole thing moving through long, physically demanding days.

Stand near the kilns and imagine it: stone arriving, fuel being carried in, lime leaving in barrels. What looks still today was once organized around constant activity. That’s what makes the stop work. The kilns give your imagination something solid to build on.

Read the land

See the countryside differently

Jackson County’s rock is part of its scenery: in the bluffs, in the outcrops and underground at the caves. At Hurstville it becomes part of an economic story too.

Someone recognized a resource, built a business on it and created a place where people worked and lived. The kilns were the heart of the company town of Hurstville. Interpretive signs on site explain that history and help make sense of what’s in front of you.

Read the signs before you take your last photo. I reframed my shot completely once I knew what had happened here.

The kilns make a natural pairing with Maquoketa Caves. One shows you the rock as a landscape to explore. The other shows you what people made from it. Together they give you a fuller picture of this part of Iowa: shaped first by nature, then again by the people who figured out how to work with what was here.