Dorset is located at the northern end of a long, deep valley formed between the Green Mountains to the east and the Taconic Range to the west.  The valley is breath-takingly beautiful. Every view is a post card. Dorset Mountain, the "Marble Mountain", rises up from the valley in Dorset.  The southernmost peak of Dorset Mountain is called Green Peak or Mount Aeolus. 

Draw a square with Green Peak in the center and the ridge of Dorset mountain trailing off to the north. These are the town boundaries of Dorset. The mountain takes up most of the square.  No roads go to the top.  To the west will be Dorset Village.  To the southwest is the village of South Dorset.  To the east is East Dorset and to the northeast is North Dorset.  There's also a region called Dorset Hollow just to the east of Dorset Village, up in a mountainside valley.

Each village has it's own history and flavor.  Dorset Village has been the quiet, upscale, quaint, expensive and beautiful enclave pursued by the "summer people", even back to the 1800's.  East and North Dorset were hard-working marble quarry towns.  South Dorset was more of a rural, farming community.   (See map.)

Old Photo:  Greek Peak (Mt. Aeolus) viewed from the south.  Owl's Head is the distinctive knob to the far left.  The cleared fields that go up the flank of the mountain were the home to many Irish.  One quarry is clearly seen above these fields in this old photo.  (Photo source and date unknown).

The population of Dorset has always been low, which isn't too surprising when you consider that there is a mountain right in the middle of it.   It peaked in 1870 at 2,195 as the marble quarries were mined for Civil War monuments and tombstones.   But most of the quarries closed and by 1930 the population had fallen to 1,119. Quite a drop. 

Other than the Irish-Catholic population, Dorset was always a clear-cut white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant town.  New England was the realm of the Puritans, the hard-core Protestants who believed that pleasure was a sin and furniture should be uncomfortable, although people had mellowed quite a bit by the time the Irish Catholics arrived.  Still, the Irish were the minority group in Dorset.  

The first marble quarry opened in 1785, and it was probably the first commercial marble quarry in the United States. During the next 130 years, sixteen million cubic feet of brilliant white marble would be removed from two dozen quarries on Green Peak, much of it by Irishmen.  Marble operations peaked in the 1870's after the Civil War ended, due to all the marble monuments and tombstones that were needed to commerate that sad event.  Marble from the same rock formation is still mined just to the north in Danby, and is marketed as "Danby Marble".    This marble has been used all over the country, including the Jefferson memorial (above).

Besides the quarries, marble-finishing mills also offered employment to the mass of unskilled Irishmen coming to the country.  In 1880, about 400 people worked in the marble quarries and mills in Dorset. 

Click left photo to enlarge