Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Stinesville, IN

Stinesville is a small town in Monroe County in Indiana's limestone belt, about 14 miles northwest of Bloomington.

Stinesville is known as the birthplace of Indiana's limestone industry: in 1827 Richard Gilbert opened the state's first commercial limestone quarry three-quarters of a mile south of town on Jack's Defeat Creek.

The town was platted in 1855, after the Monon Railroad's expansion into the area opened a national market for its oolitic limestone.

By 1860 four limestone quarries surrounded Stinesville, and in the 1890s it boomed into a town of nearly 1,000 people, many of them European stone carvers and artisans — locals said you could hear seven languages spoken on Main Street.

Stinesville limestone was used in landmarks across the country, including the Indiana Statehouse, the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Indianapolis, and Chicago's Tribune Tower.

Five solid limestone commercial blocks survive downtown as the Stinesville Commercial Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places — an unusually grand building stock for such a small town, since nearly anywhere else they would have been simple wood-framed shops.

A disastrous fire swept through Stinesville in 1894, and when the Hoadley limestone mill burned in 1916 its owners rebuilt in Bloomington instead, starting the town's long decline.

Today Stinesville's population hovers around 200 people, only a fraction of its quarry-boom peak.