Maine is well-known for its hard rock. Not the Metallica kind. The kind used to build post offices, customs houses and monuments. Prisons, office buildings, churches and more recently, kitchen countertops.

You guessed it: granite.

It’s known as “the stone that built the nation,” but only a few Maine quarries remain active, mainly in the coastal region from Penobscot Bay to Washington County.

The Maine granite industry was primarily located along the coast because access to transportation was important for the bulky product, according to the Maine Geological Survey.

Oxen were used to haul the granite blocks on “galamanders,” special stone-hauling vehicles. Derricks were used to move the blocks up out of the quarry and onto the wagons.

Perhaps as “monuments” to the industry, hundreds of idle quarries today dot the landscape from coastal islands to inland towns such as Hallowell and New Sharon.

In the late 1800s, at the height of the industry, Maine had 138 working quarries throughout 11 counties, according to Steven Haynes, the co-founder and curator of the Maine Granite Industry Historical Society on Mount Desert Island.

He and society co-founder Juanita Sprague have visited and collected samples from “well over 350 quarries on the coast of Maine and New England,” he said in a recent interview.

Mount Desert Island, for example, had 68 quarries, he said, many of which were one- or two-man operations on private property. The stone was used locally.

“Every part of Maine had not one quarry, not two quarries, but in some areas eight or nine,” Haynes said.

The quarry samples he and Sprague collect are displayed in the Maine Granite Museum, along with a collection of newspaper articles, tools and artifacts. The museum is part of the historical society.

“Our museum houses hundreds of tools used by quarrymen, blacksmiths, stone cutters and stone carvers,” Haynes said. Also on display are historic photos of quarry operations, quarry towns and their people.

The society was established as a nonprofit in 2002, but Haynes’ quest to gather stone samples from every Maine quarry and to record the stories of quarrymen began long before that.

He was 11 years old when he was apprenticed to work in a granite mine on the island in the early 1960s.

He learned the “old way” from a retired merchant marine who wanted to pass on the skill of using hammers and wedges to drill holes and split off sheets of stone.

A hole was drilled in the stone and metal pieces called half-rounds were dropped into the hole. A wedge was dropped between the half-rounds. A quarryman would use a hammer to lightly tap the wedges (in a row along the length of the stone) until the stone split.

“You don’t really get it until you experience a block of granite being split, the cracking of that block, the force,” Haynes said.

By the 1960s, however, most splitting was done with diamond saws and flame, he said.

He said he was chosen for the training because of his involvement in the local rock club and because of his family history.

“My great-great-grandfather was a stonecutter from England and my mother’s father was a blacksmith working for a quarry in Bar Harbor,” he said.

The apprenticeship, which lasted four years, led to Haynes’ lifelong passion for collecting and curating relics of a once-booming industry.

By the time of his apprenticeship, granite quarrying was already waning.

“On the island here, the last stone was shipped out in ’65,” Haynes said. That granite was used to build the Rayburn House of Representatives office building in Washington, D.C.

Maine quarries were most active from the 1830s to about 1915 when steel and concrete became more easily available and was a lot less expensive, Haynes said.

In 1902, Maine ranked No. 1 in granite production in the United States, he said.

“That meant something like 4,500 men working on the coast of Maine (where the majority of quarries were sited), most from Ireland, Wales and England,” he said. From the 1790s into the 1930s, these men and others from Germany, Finland, Sweden, Scotland and Italy came to work in the quarries.

They were called “mechanics of the arts,” Haynes said. The term was used to define stone cutters and carvers, blacksmiths, glass blowers, weavers and candlemakers.

Also known as Freemasons, stone cutters mined granite that was used to build fortresses, prisons and Army barracks along the Hudson River, Haynes said.

Each region of the state yields unique granite in terms of color, density and grain.

The Maine Geological Survey defines granite as “a light-colored igneous rock made of fine- and coarse-grained crystals of quartz and feldspar.

“Often dark crystals of mica or hornblende are mixed in the rock giving it a salt and pepper look. The color of granite, often important in its value as a building stone, is mostly determined by the color of the feldspar. Feldspar can be white, salmon, tan, or pink. The quartz crystals in granite are generally clear, milky or smoky in color.”

Soft granite from Hallowell was used to build a monument to the soldiers who fought in the Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania during the Civil War.

White granite from the North Jay quarry was used for Ulysses S. Grant’s tomb in New York state, the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Lewiston and Cutler Memorial Library in Farmington.

Pink granite from Vinalhaven Island was cut in sheets of up to 72 feet and was used in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

FIRE AND ICE

Maine granite is plutonic, created by the heat and pressure of ancient volcanoes, according to the Maine Geological Survey.

“The grain size of the granite is determined by how fast or slow the molten rock solidifies. Fast-cooling magma forms small crystals, while slow-cooling magma forms large crystals.

“The erosion and uplift of the overlying rock exposes these plutonic rocks to the atmosphere. The emplacement of many of the granite plutons in Maine took place hundreds of millions of years ago.”

The molten magma cooled within the crust to form granite, according to the survey. Subsequent erosion exposed the granitic rocks at the surface of the Earth.

Haynes describes this process with dramatic flair, beginning with the breakup of the equatorial continent some 550 million years ago.

“These new continents (tectonic plates) are coming to North America and smashing into it,” Haynes said of that time.

“These created heat, pressure, and they now are forming the coast of Maine and very large volcanic mountains from Calais to Portland,” he said.

More tectonic plates from the equatorial continent drifted up and smashed into North America over the next 180 million years. Volcanoes erupted and mountains grew higher.

About 1 million years ago came the glaciers from the north: “Two miles (thick) of ice carrying huge boulders, tearing off the crumbling mountaintops,” Haynes said.

Under those mountaintops, formed by volcanic magma, was granite, which was too hard for the glaciers to move, so they went over the top of it, he said.

Eventually, the mountains rose again and the land rebounded, causing the granite to split horizontally into layers called sheeting.

“This allowed the quarrymen from Europe to have all these mountains of granite that were pre-cut,” Haynes said.

The quarrying of stone for cellars and foundations began in Maine in the 1700s as settlers discovered exposed ledges of granite, according to the Maine Granite Industry Historical Society website.

In the early 1800s, commercial quarries started producing stone for buildings, bridges and monuments.

“Maine quarries along the coast and islands were particularly successful in the early years because of the quality and depth of the granite, and their location made it easy to ship stone to the growing cities of the East Coast,” according to the website.

The industry waned after the early 1900s because of technology changes. Steel-reinforced concrete became the most common construction material for buildings and bridges.

This resulted in less expensive but less durable structures, Haynes said.

“Exposure to salt breaks down concrete,” he said. “It only lasts about 60 years, whereas granite fortresses are 150 years old and still standing.”

The introduction of union labor was another cause of the decline of the industry, according to the Maine Geological Survey.

“Business costs could not keep up with locally quarried stone and the newly introduced reinforced concrete.”

The few still-active mines mostly work to supply stone to the housing market for countertops and landscaping purposes. Maine granite is still used in the construction trades for the facades of buildings.

‘NORTH JAY WHITE’

One of the few still-active quarries is in the Franklin County town of Jay. Granite was discovered in the 1880s on what was later called Quarry Hill.

The rare “white” stone was made up of white feldspar, clear quartz, black and white mica and a small garnet grain. It was described as remarkably hard and “pure,” without the black knots found in most granite.

Quarrying began as a small-scale operation with local people using the stone for foundations and fences, said Elise Howes Despres, president of the Jay Historical Society.

The first major customer was U.S. Sen. William Clark of Montana, who bought the quarry and named it the American Stone Co. He built a mile-long railway to connect the foot of the quarry to the Maine Central Railroad, Despres said. He used the granite to build a $100,000 mansion he called the “White House” on Fifth Avenue in New York.

From 1910 to 1930, more than 300 men worked at the three major North Jay quarries, many of whom were Italian, Swedish and French immigrants.

“The boulder quarry yielded small stones, the big quarry on the mountain (Quarry Hill) yielded very large sheets that could be cut into long columns, and there was a side quarry on the hillside,” said Haynes of the Maine Granite Industry Historical Society.

The quarrymen working there produced 1 million paving stones a year and 250 tons of crushed rock each day, Despres said.

Operations ceased in 1936, but started again during World War II on a defense project for the U.S. Navy. This work ended with the war. The Maine and New Hampshire Granite Co. reopened in 1947 for windowsills and steps for new college dormitories at the University of Maine in Orono. It then closed again.

The quarry is now owned by Polycor, a Canadian company that did not respond to a request for an interview. The operation is off limits to the public and the granite is trucked to Canada for processing, according to Haynes.

Despres grew up at Howes Apple Orchard, which borders the quarry, a “great place to hike and explore,” she said.

“I remember three large pits that had water in them and old rusty cables in the water,” she said. “Some people would swim in them.”

She also recalled a small granite building with a heavy metal door: the gunpowder shack. Black powder was used to blast out blocks of granite for cutting.

When she was a kid during the 1960s and ‘70s, the quarry employed only one stone cutter, she said.

“(Matthew) Wilson every day drove by our barn on the Quarry Road and he would always throw out of his truck window a Hershey candy bar (to us) as he drove by,” Despres said.

Wilson was profiled in a newspaper article in 1969 by longtime Sun Journal and Franklin Journal contributor Barbara Yeaton. The headline on the piece was, “Rugged 84-year-old Scotsman still plies his trade as granite cutter in North Jay.”

Though the quarry was not operating full steam at the time, it had opened with one company man as overseer and one cutter (Wilson) to provide stone for St. Joseph Church and rectory in Portland, Haynes said.

He said legislation introduced recently to make granitic pegmatite the state rock was “probably a good thing.”

Maine is known for its pegmatite gemstones such as tourmaline and garnet, he said, “but Maine granite built the nation. Juanita and I have brought all of that history back to life, so it’s not forgotten.”

Maine Granite by the numbers

300 feet: Depth of deepest granite quarry in the U.S. (Barre, Vermont)

72 feet: Length of longest sheets of granite quarried in the U.S. (Vinalhaven)

1902: Year in which Maine ranked No. 1 in granite production in the U.S.

4,500: Number of quarrymen working on the coast of Maine that year

4: Number of men it took to operate a striking drill that split the granite into sheets

138: Number of working quarries in Maine in the late 1800s

$100,000: Cost of a mansion built from North Jay granite in the 1880s

300: Number of men working in North Jay quarries from 1910-1930

1 million: Number of paving stones per year produced at the North Jay quarries.

Sources: Maine Granite Industry Historical Society; Jay Historical Society

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