524 - Crowley Flint Quarry

The Crowley Flint Quarry State Historic Site near Golden Valley in Mercer County preserves a pock-marked landscape where, for thousands of years, indigenous peoples mined for Knife River flint—a coffee-colored, translucent stone ideal for making certain tools. This type of flint is easily chipped, shaped, and sharpened into tools for hunting and food preparation through a process called “flint knapping.” For this reason, it is one of the most important lithic (or “stone”) materials used by prehistoric people in North America. In fact, Knife River flint was so desirable that it became a major trade good for people on the Northern Plains. Artifacts made from Knife River flint have been found in archaeological sites as far away as Pennsylvania! It was often exchanged for goods considered equally rare, useful, or exotic to people here–things like marine shells from the Gulf of Mexico, copper from the Great Lakes, or volcanic obsidian from the area around present-day Yellowstone National Park.

At Crowley Flint Quarry, depressions in the earth were created by prehistoric miners, digging and extracting chunks of Knife River flint. The earliest people to use this quarry were Ice Age inhabitants of North Dakota, who could find cobbles of flint just by digging shallow holes in the loose glacial gravel. But over time, people had to dig deeper and deeper to find suitable pieces. By the first century A.D., digging Knife River flint was a well-organized activity. Today, some of the quarry pits measure as many as nine feet across and are up to three feet deep..

Knife River flint remained the predominant lithic material for tool making in the area until metal tools were introduced by European traders.

Because Crowley Flint Quarry is surrounded by private land with no access road, it is currently closed to the public. But a number of similar quarry sites in North Dakota are accessible and have even been excavated by archaeologists, producing a wealth of information about North Dakota’s first major export and its miners.