Small-scale sand pits for mining the Mosbach sands close to the surface and quarries for extracting the tertiary limestone lying at shallow depths for lime burning already existed in the Biebrich region before the beginning of the 19th century.

In 1864, the parent company of today's Dyckerhoff GmbH Group was founded in Amöneburg. While the raw material was still brought in by ship from limestone quarries in Oppenheim and Budenheim in unsuccessful preliminary attempts to manufacture cement, quarries close to the factory were developed on the right bank of the Rhine from 1871 (Flörsheim, Schwalbenlach near Biebrich). In 1912, the Dyckerhoff company then opened a large open-cast mine (Kastel quarry) for the extraction of lime, which spread across the "Auf dem Hessler" and "Der Hambusch" areas as well as the Elisabethenhöhe to the east of the Salzbach, where smaller quarries for lime and sand had previously existed. The topographical maps of the last 140 years, starting with the Gradabteilungskarte des königlich-preußischen Generalstabes (recorded in 1867/68) impressively show the development and the extensive expansion of this quarry area.

In 1989, the previously existing small limestone quarry "Kalkofen" north of the A 66 highway was connected to the "Kastel" limestone quarry to the south by means of a tunnel and opened up. The thickness of the Mosbach sands in this quarry is very low; the Tertiary limestones and marls are directly overlain by loess.

The Kastel quarry was exploited at the beginning of the 1990s and is now home to large areas of the waste disposal company of the state capital of Wiesbaden (ELW). In the 1990s, lime extraction in the new Ostfeld quarry moved eastwards into the Rheingauer Feld, but was finally abandoned there in 2005. In the large quarry areas of Dyckerhoff GmbH, the Mosbach sands were mainly extracted as overburden; only a few larger pure sand quarries (e.g. Winkler and Kimmel pits) survived into the second half of the 20th century. At present (2015), a smaller sand extraction field is still in operation within the Dyckerhoff area (in the Ostfeld quarry).