Our Slate

Bison Hill Stonecrafts was born from slate, and we have the most expansive selection of colors, products, designs, and personalization you'll find anywhere.  You're sure to get a little extra love with your product as everything is handmade in our Waterford, Pennsylvania workshop. It gives us great pride to take used roofing and flooring slate, and recycle them into beautiful art pieces, household products, and functional decorations.  We've come a long way since the first ever bison slate craft in 2014!

The slate we use is completely natural and has no additional chemicals, additives, or finishes.  It is very environmentally friendly as a roofing and flooring material due to the low embodied energy in producing it.  Slate is truly one of earth's super stones, it can resist nature's fury for over 100 years on a roof and then be reclaimed for another lifetime of use.  To gather our materials, we work with local slate roofers and quarries to collect their unusable slates and re-purpose them into brand new household products. 

Many people don’t realize there is a diverse spectrum of colors that slate comes in. All of the colors are the natural shade of the rock as it is quarried.  You can dig in one area and get royal purple and then 40 feet away will be Vermont green, and sometimes, like the photo below, all the colors of slate show up in one single tile!  They look amazing on a roof, but you can really appreciate the uniqueness of each slate when you hold it up close.

Slate is dynamic material that develops new patterns and textures as it ages.  Some slates are unfading and will hold their color through eternity, while others age as they react to their environment.  The sun, rain, snow, and climate all contribute a different character to the weathering of the slate through gorgeous patterns and color gradients.  Over the decades, beautiful pinks, oranges, reds, browns, and blacks blanket the surface of the slate making each one a unique canvas for your product.

You can shop our Slate Products here.

Our Marble

Marble is the one material that has epitomized art and high culture for thousands of years. Greek and Roman artists prized the stone for its veining, strength, and ability to take a polish.  They took huge slabs of Cararra marble in Italy and created masterpieces of art that are still celebrated today.  Marble is still renowned as a premium building material for the same raw beauty the ancients found so appealing.  Now you can have all that beauty in a functional household product designed to last a lifetime.

After extensive experience cutting slate, we've been able to unlock the beauty of marble and bring it into your home.  We work directly with the marble supplier to get the highest quality marble.  Once the marble is delivered to us, we select only the sections with the highest contrast of color variations and most striking veining for use in our products.  Each piece is then painstakingly hand cut to ensure all the intricate details of your product are present.  You'll know you made the right choice when the recipient opens the box with an open mouth and just says "Wow, that's beautiful."

You can find the perfect Marble Gift right here. 

About Bison Hill Stonecrafts

"I've always had a love for natural stone since I was a kid, I used to run around with a hammer breaking rocks open just to see what colors were inside.  Stone always attracted me as a design material due to the permanence of it, when something is carved in stone it lasts forever.  Slate roofs started to draw my attention during college at Penn State, the most beautiful buildings in town always have a slate roof on them.  So I got some scrap slate from a family friend in 2014 and started making crafts out of them.  At first it was just coasters and crosses, but I kept experimenting and finding more uses for the slate.  

With urging from friends and family I started my Etsy shop in the spring of 2015.  The reaction from our customers was a complete surprise and caught me unprepared during my first Christmas season.  It was almost overwhelming but it made me realize my little side hobby might actually have what it takes to be a real business!  After the gifting rush was over I had time to focus on some other projects like introducing a line of marble products and expanding the slate products.  I'm continually experimenting with new products to make from natural stone and hope to release some cool new products soon!" 

-Andrew Church, Owner

Make sure to check out our product pages, I guarantee we can create the perfect gift for your next birthday, anniversary, house warming, or Christmas party!

Slate Cheese Boards - Marble Cheese Boards - Slate Christmas Ornaments - Slate House Numbers