Granite quarry

“ This quarry, and one at a short distance, merely supply the blocks of granite, which, being detached from the main stone, are piled upon cars, and sent down an inclined plane to the rail-road, by means of a powerful chain, which acts at once as a support and check, suffering the load to proceed slowly down the declivity, and at the same time sending up from the bottom, upon another track, the empty car from which the granite has been unloaded below, as the buckets of a well are drawn up and down. ”

“ At Aberdeen, we found that many additional quarries had lately been opened, some of them of an excellent quality, and capable of producing larger blocks of stone than granite quarries usually do; but still it is doubtful, as has been formerly mentioned, whether any one quarry will be found to produce a sufficiency of large blocks in any reasonable time; but by purchasing from different quarries, a regular supply may be procured for all the purposes wanted, in case you shall determine upon using the granite in preference to stones from Kingoodie. ”

“ When a stone man is as big as a four-story house, I cease to grasp him. I climbed upon the arm of this Rameses, and found his name cut deeply in the hard granite, the cutting polished to the very bottom like the finest intaglio. The polishing alone of this great mass must have been an incredible labor. How was it moved from its quarry in Assouan, a hundred and thirty miles distant? And how was it broken into the thousand fragments in which it lies? An earthquake would not do it. There are no marks of drilling or the use of an explosive material. ”

“ He tells us that in an old quarry at Syrene there is to be seen an obelisk upon which the workmen were busy, when for some reason they were obliged to leave it only partially cut out. From this it appears that when the quarrymen wished to abstract a huge mass, such as the Needle would be, they marked out the form by cutting a deep groove, in which, at intervals, they made oblong holes. Into these holes they firmly wedged blocks of timber, and then, filling the grooves with water, the wood in time swelled and thus the granite cracked along the outline from wedge to wedge. ”

“ That the spot should have been visited for untold centuries by all the Indian nations, who hid their weapons as they approached it, under fear of the vengeance of the Great Spirit, will not seem strange when the religion of the race is understood. One of the principal features of the quarry is a perpendicular wall of granite about thirty feet high, facing the west, and nearly two miles long. At the base of the wall there is a level prairie, running parallel to it, half a mile wide. ”

“ They rest upon the surface or are slightly imbedded in the soil; and, so far as my own observation extends, are of distinct granitic formation, of various density and composition. Several specimens I obtained are as heavy as metal, and doubtless contain iron. Many of them, however, like those round masses dug from the ancient works in Ohio, are pyritous in character. There is a mystery about these "lost rocks" not easily solved, for no granite quarry has ever yet been discovered in Illinois. Their appearance, in the midst of a vast prairie, is dreary and lonely enough. ”

“ I tell you, Art, it will well repay the trouble if we can find it. A limestone quarry here would be pretty well as valuable as a gold mine. Nearly all these promontories on the western coast of Ireland are of slate or granite, and here we have not got lime within thirty miles. With a quarry on the spot, we can not only build cheap and reclaim our own bog, but we can supply five hundred square miles of country with the rudiments of prosperity, and at a nominal price compared with what they pay now! ”

“ Listen, Madison, don't talk about what you don't know anything about. The stuff in these walls isn't just rock; it isn't even plain granite. Granite City exports some of the finest grade of the stone in the world. And it's used all over the world. We aren't just a bunch of meatheaded ditch diggers—we are craftsmen. We have to figure a different way of getting out every piece of stone. ”

“ When they reached the quarry, they found it so difficult to drive the carriage near to the rough building where they were told the owner could be found, that papa turned back and drove through one street to a fine hotel. He called for a private parlor, and left mamma resting on the sofa with Winnie to keep her company, while he took Herbert to the large quarry, tied Duke, and went to see the huge blocks of granite that were being cut out. ”

“ Anything seems easy after sled-dragging over hummocks and crevasses, and the constant nerve-strain in jumping crevasses so as not to slip in making the spring. Quarry Mountain is the barest I have seen, a raw quarry with infinite abundance of loose decaying granite all on the go. Its slopes are excessively steep. A few patches of epilobium make gay purple spots of color. Its seeds fly everywhere seeking homes. Quarry Mountain is cut across into a series of parallel ridges by oversweeping ice. ”

“ Granites also appear at the surface in the Trans-Pecos country of west Texas. Some of these areas include the Franklin Mountains of El Paso County, the Quitman Mountains of Hudspeth County, the Chisos Mountains of Brewster County, and the Chinati Mountains of Presidio County.
Red, pink, and gray granites from quarries in the Llano uplift area are widely used as building stones and monument stones. A large quarry at Granite Mountain just west of Marble Falls in Burnet County has supplied pink granite for buildings in many parts of the United States. ”

“ In Little Cottonwood canyon we have continually at work a force of from twenty-five to sixty men quarrying granite, and every day, Sundays excepted, two or three car loads of this granite, from ten to twelve tons each load, are brought from the quarry to the Temple Block. ”

“ A colony of substantial three-room houses, two large boarding-houses, a power house and, farther up beyond the pines, a stone house and a long low building, partly of wood, partly of granite waste cemented, circled the edges of the quarry.
The usual tale of workmen in the fat years was five hundred quarrymen and three hundred stone-cutters. This population of working-men, swelled to three thousand by the addition of their families, increased or diminished according as the years and seasons proved fat or lean. ”

“ Of other non-metallic mineral substances, apart from coal, petroleum and natural gas, little need be said in detail. Stone is of the greatest actual importance, the value of the quarry output, including some prepared or manufactured product, such as dressed and crushed stone, averaging $65,152,312 annually in 1904-1908. Limestone is by far the largest element, and with granite makes up two-thirds of the total value. Vermont, Pennsylvania and New York are the leading producers. ”

“ It is surrounded on all sides by immense heaps of débris, which has been repeatedly dug into during the last thirty years by geologising students, in search of fossils connected with the carboniferous system, and who must have frequently met with the substance which has caused all this excitement, but never imagined it to be gold. The face of the quarry, to the depth of twenty feet from the top, is an accumulation of shale or slate, lying in regular layers, and easily broken. ”

“ The quarry itself is merely a piece of moor that has been trenched to the depth of some five or six feet from the surface, and that presents, at the line where the broken ground leans against the ground still unbroken, a low uneven frontage, somewhat resembling that of a ruinous stone-fence. It has been opened in the outcrop of an ichthyolite bed of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, on which in this locality the thin moory soil immediately rests, without the intervention of the common boulder clay of the country ”

“ The New England States are the greatest producers, while the Piedmont Plateau district (east of the Appalachians) from Philadelphia to Alabama also contains important granite quarries. In the Adirondack Mountains, in Wisconsin and Minnesota, through the Rocky Mountains, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains there are extensive areas of granite which are relatively little quarried. The granite occurs only in regions of highly disturbed rocks, usually in mountains or hills, where great volumes of the molten rock were forced into the earth’s crust, cooled, and later laid bare by erosion. ”

“ For instance, a stone of 90% purity, which is close at hand, will probably be more valuable than one of 98% purity which must be hauled fifteen miles. Bare hillsides or creek banks where a crusher can be set up to handle the stone without extra lifting are preferable for quarry sites. Usually the overburden is less in such an exposed face. Impurities in limestone deposits may be large chert (flint) nodules which can be hand-sorted out, sand grains, clay which settled into and onto the stone during its accumulation, and pyrite (fool’s gold) or other minerals of lesser importance. ”

“ Many building and manufacturing enterprises have met disastrous checks, because of a tendency to assume availability of stone without making the fullest technical investigation. Many quarrying ventures have come to grief for the same reason. It is easy to assume that, because a granite in a certain locality is profitably quarried and used, some other granite in the same locality has equal chances. However, minor differences in structure, texture, and composition, or in costs of quarrying and transportation, may make all the difference between profit and loss. ”

“ Now he had forsaken the trails of moose and bear and caribou to seek the elusive "color" in the sands of the mountain streams, or the unobtrusive outcrop of the quartz that carries gold. But the old instincts were still strong in him. He felt the lure of a splendid and unknown quarry. He coveted the magnificent head of that calm watcher on the peak; and, having heard that the wild mountain ram of the Rockies was an extraordinarily difficult quarry to bring down, he itched to try his old eastern woodcraft in this new chase and win the prize unaided. ”

“ The ancients, instead of opening out a good face, so that the quarries might be worked to any extent with advantage, excavated caverns in the side of the hill, and having arrived at the good sound rock, cut it out by wedges and picks in such masses as they required, so that the inside of the quarry presented a long gallery from whence the stone had been taken, worked in a very regular manner in steps one above the other, without any appearance of waste; in fact, the rock is so solid that when worked by pick and wedge no blasting is necessary ”

“ The specus is six feet high and two feet wide, and it is filled up to nearly half its height by solid clay, evidently the deposit left by the water. The old specus, long after it had been out of use, seems to have been employed by the quarrymen: as it was a tunnel in the tufa rock just high and wide enough for a man to walk in, by cutting away one side they made it wide enough for a horse and cart to carry the stone, and they raised the vault as high as was convenient for the purpose of making an entrance into the quarry. ”

“ Or were the quarrymen driven from the desert, and the Pharaoh from his throne, by the hungry hordes of Ethiopia, or Syria, or the islands beyond the sea? The great stone may be older than Rameses the Great, or as modern as the last of the Romans; but to give it a date, or to divine its history, is impossible. Egypt{172}ology, which has solved the enigma of the sphinx, is powerless here. The obelisk of the quarry holds its secret safe, and holds it forever.
Ancient Egyptian quarrying is seen under its most striking aspect among extensive limestone or sandstone ranges, as at Turra and Silsilis ”

“ Fine white freestone abounds in the immediate vicinity (as at Craigleith, from the vast quarry of which, now passing into disuse, the stone for much of the New Town was obtained) and furnishes excellent building material; while the hard trap rock, with which the stratified sandstones of the Coal formation have been extensively broken up and overlaid, supplies good materials for paving and road-making. On this account quarrying is another industry which is seldom dormant. ”

“ Its strength consists of three hundred men, together with about the same number of infantry at Camp Smith, at Rock or Dupere Rapid, a few miles above, who are engaged in quarrying stone for a permanent fortification at that point. On visiting this quarry, I found it to consist of a bluish-gray limestone, semi-crystalline in its structure, containing small disseminated masses of sulphuret of zinc, calcspar, and iron pyrites, and corresponding, in every respect, with the beds of this rock observed along the upper parts of the Fox and Wisconsin valleys. ”

“ Indications show that the roof consisted of logs, probably covered with canes supporting a layer of masonry and cement. The quarries of the ancient builders have been discovered in the hills, together with the rude stone picks by means of which they hewed out the blocks, and, as Holmes writes, “the feats of engineering necessary to transport masses of stone many tons in weight down a thousand feet of precipitous mountain-face, accomplished by these stone-age quarry-men, would be regarded as important undertakings, even by our enterprising [179] engineers of to-day.” ”