Free Stories in Stone by David B. Williams Page A

feather technique.
    As Boston grew in prominence, its leading architectural style spread. Customhouses in Savannah,Georgia; San Francisco; and
     Portland,Maine, used Quincy Granite. In 1836 Willard provided stone for the New York Merchants Exchange, designed by another
     former student, Isaiah Rogers. Quincy quarrymen also shipped millions of paving stones to New York (still visible in a few
     streets in Greenwich Village, SoHo, and TriBeCa), Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. (Vic Campbell said that one of the major
     paving stone suppliers didn’t actually quarry the stones, they simply collected waste from a quarry on the hill above their
     shop and cut it into paving blocks.) The hole in the Granite Railway Quarry began to grow.
    Other granite areas beside Quincy also prospered. Rockport quarries provided a dark gray rock, transported by sea. The pink
     Milford Granite ended up in the Boston Public Library and New York’s Penn Station, and granite from Chelmsford was floated
     down the Middlesex Canal to the state prison, where it was cut. Rocks were shipped around the country and to Cuba.
    Each of the New England states began to excavate, cut, and ship granite as well. By 1889, Maine had 153 granite quarries,
     including one in Vinalhaven that employed fifteen hundred people. Quarries in New Hampshire (now nicknamed the Granite State),
     Rhode Island,Connecticut, and Vermont (home of Barre, the self-proclaimed “Granite Center of the World”) generated everything
     from paving stones to a single block three hundred feet long, twenty feet wide, and six to ten feet thick.
    They all shared one characteristic—access to transportation. In Maine the quarries were situated on the coast. Vermont’s were
     near railroads, as were Connecticut’s, which also had quarries on rivers and the coast. In areas where transportation was
     a problem, builders used the stone locally and moved rock via carts over dirt or cobblestone roads.
    Granite continued to dominate as a building stone for many years, aided by its physical attributes. Because of the abundant
     feldspar and quartz, granite is twice as hard as limestone or marble, up to twice as hard as slate, and at least equal to
     and generally harder than sandstone, which is usually also made of feldspar and quartz grains. Because of the interlocked
     minerals, granite is significantly less porous than sandstone and limestone, and about equal in porosity to marble and slate.
     In the age before steel beams, when stone had to provide the only means of support, granite’s compressive strength made it
     essential for monumental structures.
    In the past two decades granite has again become popular, for many of the same reasons, although compressibility is less important
     with steel infrastructures. Homeowners desire it because of its hardness. (Slicing and dicing with a good sharp Henckels knife
     will scratch a marble countertop.) Now, however, granite from the United States has lost ground to that of Finland, China,
     Norway, Sardinia, and South Africa. Baltic Brown, Big White Flower, Blue Pearl, Rosa Beta, and Zimbabwe Black are some granites
     that now dominate the market.
    The Quincy Granite’s massive nature, as well as its dark color and ability to take a polish, helped make it a popular building
     stone until about the Civil War. As railroads spread, however, less expensive granite started to flood the market and undercut
     Quincy’s competitiveness. Devastating fires in Chicago and Boston further weakened demand by revealing that heat flaked and
     cracked granite. A second wave of demand for Quincy did rise in the 1880s and 1890s but not as a building stone. Instead,
     people wanted the dark granite for Civil War monuments and later for gravestones.
    The beginning of the end of the Quincy quarries began in World War I when people stripped them of iron and steel and scrapped
     the machinery to melt down for shipbuilding. Demand continued to drop and finally plummeted