Thread: The origin of the so-called „Schwedenstein“ Hones

I spent some days in the thuringian and frankoninan mountains in springtime this year again to visit some for me formerly unknown mines and to try to solve some hone mysteries.

One mystery I was looking for a longer time now was the origin of the so-called Schwedenstein hones.
I have reported elsewhere that I was quite sure that the mountain Schwedenstein, located in Saxonia, Germany, was not the source of the hones with that name. The geology of mount Schwedenstein does not fit to the stones and from the geology groups near mount Schwedenstein nowbody ever heard about mining of whetstones in this area.

The stone matrix and material of the green mottled Schwedensteins is the same than the block mottled Escher stones I have reported in another post.

Since these stones have their origin in the Ordovician age rocks of the so-called Gräfenthal group, I especially looked for the geology of these rocks.
I found a small notice in some older literature that beside the known whetstone quarries of the Escher type waterwhetstones, which were found in the upper Devonian age rockformations, and the older Ordovician thuringian oilstones (i.e. Hiftenberg hones and saxonian oilstones) other good whetstones had been mined in the thuringian area as a byproduct of the quarries that were operated to produce slate pencils.

The thuringian mountains were very famous in the past for producing slate pencils and blackboards and for a long time period the quarries in Steinach/ Thuringia had been the global world market leader for this products.
The slate quarries to produce pencils and blackboards are much larger (maybe a factor of 10) than any thuringian whetstone quarry. And also this industry had been much more important for the thuringian area than the really small whetstone business.



To make a long story short – I finally found the source of the Schwedenstein Hones in one of the old slate mines that were used to produce slate pencils. The green mottled material is found in intermediate layers between the slate layers that are suitable for pencil production.

This also explains why a lot this hones were found on these small razor storage boxes, which are equipped with a hone and leather for honing and stropping.
The boxes in which the slate pencils had been sold look quite comparable to these razor boxes.



Here are some photos to compare the hones sold as Schwedenstein in the past and some rocks I collected at the slate pencil quarries.



Still a mystery remains the name of the stones. Well at a certain time Swedish steel was very famous for producing razors, also in germany. The term “Schwedenstahl” (translated Swedish steel) get really famous for good quality steel and maybe the producers of the Schwedenstein simply choosed a somehow related and similar sounding term to promote their hones.