Sneed’s Quarry at Highland Park/Perry Playground

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Highland Park 4th graders in Mrs. Leibick's class recently visited & studied the quarry area behind the school, which is part of the City of Austin's Perry Park, where our baseball field, soccer field, & track now lie, but which formerly served as a working rock quarry & gravel pit called Sneed's Quarry. Read more about the quarry below while the image loads...

...& About the Photo

This panoramic photo was assembled or "stitched" from a combination of 18 still photographs, taken at 20-degree intervals (360-degrees around) by one of our 4th graders with a school digital camera, using Apple Computer's Quicktime Virtual Reality (VR) Authoring Studio software. *** If you do not see the photo in the frame (it is approx 600K, so may take a minute to load), click here to download the Quicktime player/plug-in for your PC or Mac ***

Click & drag your mouse across, & up & down, over the photo image to view the full 360-degree panoramic shot of the quarry behind the school. If you do not see the zoom buttons below the picture, you can use the SHIFT & CONTROL keys to zoom in & out. This VR image is also speed sensitive; the slower/faster you drag your mouse, the more slowly or quickly the movie will pan.

Ms. Berry, one of our after-school childcare staff members, can be seen walking along the track, & kindergarteners are under the tree shadows playing on the playscape.

*** Special thanks to HP parent Canny Weems, whose company Virtually Anywhere specializes in VR photography, for contributing time toward helping us get the most out of this new technology at Highland Park. ***

Students interviewed a local senior citizen, Mr. Crawford, who shared his recollections of the operational quarry from the 1940's & 1950's.

This area was underwater millions of years ago, like the rest of Texas, but earlier this century there were trees & forest here before the quarry was blasted out.
The quarry was a limestone quarry. The limestone was taken out by blowing it out with dynamite, & then it was crushed with special machines into gravel for things like roads, so it was called a gravel pit.
The limestone was mostly sold to construction workers. It was also taken to an industrial kiln on McNeil Road, where lime was taken out of the limestone to be mixed in cement & mortar. The quarry/park behind the school is like a big pit or bowl because so much limestone was taken out of it.
The quarry/park and a large area around it, northward up Balcones Drive, which was also dug up, was owned by a man named Mr. Sneed, and there were no houses around it when it was a quarry. He eventually sold it to a real estate man named Mr. Barrow, & moved on to Georgetown, north of Austin, where he opened another, larger quarry.
The big rock outcrop sticking out of the ground at the school-side top of the quarry, in between the baseball backstop & the kindergarten playground (where Mr. Crawford is sitting above), was probably created by the earth's tectonic plates moving & pushing the rock upward.
The sun & rain change the color of exposed limestone from white to a dark gray or black color over the years.
Much of the limestone on the trail going to the back-side top of the quarry (below Balcones Road) is precipitate limestone, which has a lot of calcite in it, & which makes the rock shiny, & can be many different colors. This presence of calcite indicates that there were probably caves there before the quarry was dug up. The calcium in the calcite & limestone comes from bones & shells of ancient ocean animals.

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