Woodbury Granite Company

The Green Mountains of Vermont have long been known for the quantity and quality of their granite, marble, and slate, but Vermont's remoteness, transportation problems, and difficulties in carving the hard stone (in the case of granite), largely prevented the development of a cut stone industry. Originally, granite was collected from exposed outcrops and "boulder quarries"; only later did it become necessary to cut stone from the ground. The early granite industry in New England was dominated by coastal companies, which were able to ship their products by water. The first "granite shed" (stone trimming and finishing facility) was completed in Hardwick in 1870. Granite quarries were opened on Robeson Mountain (Vermont's largest deposit of building granite, with a deposit measuring some 2 × 4 miles (4 × 7.2 km)) in nearby Woodbury in the 1870s, but transportation limitations prevented much development of the industry. The construction of the Portland & Ogdensburg Railroad (later the St. Johnsbury and Lake Champlain Railroad) to Hardwick in 1872 made it possible to ship granite in quantity from northern Vermont to the outside world, opening new markets. While the finer-grained granite of Barre was preferred for monuments and gravestones, the coarser-grained Woodbury stone found a market in "architectural" uses such as buildings and paving, for which the Barre stone was too expensive. In addition, the northern stone had greater compressive strength than Barre's, making it preferable for construction of larger, heavier structures such as buildings, bridges, and mausoleums. ==Incorporation==

The Voodry & Town granite quarry, located on the side of Robeson Mountain in Woodbury, was opened in 1880. The company had not been enjoying great success simply selling rough quarry blocks to others for finishing; the value of its product was likely too small, and the difficulty of transporting it too great. Holden had owned a Pennsylvania oil refinery that he sold to the Standard Oil Co.; he reinvested the oil proceeds in textile mills and succeeded there as well, so he had considerable money to put into his next venture. The textile business was cooling, and the two were looking to diversify their investments. Holden's brother, Daniel, was assigned to the quarry and set about modernizing it; the new owners quickly installed two 75-ton derricks. With their purchase, control of the railroad passed from Fletcher and his allies, and the WGC became its plurality shareholder. People in Woodbury, especially, were concerned with this shift of control, but the railroad gave assurances of equal treatment of all local granite companies, and agreed to provide free switch connections in its first year. By 1897, the railroad was completed to the top of Robeson Mountain and the Woodbury quarries. Bickford replaced Daniel Holden as superintendent of the WGC in 1898. The quarries developed rapidly, and Woodbury Granite's success was secured. ==Expansion==

The availability of reliable, inexpensive transportation of granite from the hillside quarries to the Hardwick finishing sheds was vital to the growth and development of the local granite industry in Hardwick and Woodbury. In 1906, the company built an additional circular shed (No. 5) to house carvers whose work included column capitals, panels, ornamentation, statuary, and lettering. Eight railroad spurs ran across the 870-foot (265 m) long stone yard; an overhead traveling crane allowed 16 railroad cars to be unloaded and loaded simultaneously. With the confidence and backing of his father-in-law, Bickford was able to make the needed investments to undertake and complete execute large projects. The company made major investments in machinery and tools for its finishing sheds and quarries. To power them, it built its own hydropower facility, supplementing the village's plant. According to historian Paul Wood, the company's name was made when it won the contract to provide finished granite for the new Pennsylvania State Capitol building in 1903. The contract, at the time the largest building granite contract in history, called for the delivery and setting of of finished stone in the extraordinary span of 24 months. Many in the industry saw these terms as impossible to meet. The shareholders of the company pledged their personal fortunes to guarantee the company's performance, and the Woodbury company was awarded the contract. "Hardwick To Boom!" boasted the Hardwick Gazette on March 26. "$2,000,000 contract is secured for the Pennsylvania Capitol Building, Woodbury Gray Granite to be finished in Hardwick. Two years' work, Hundreds of new employees will be needed." The size of the capitol contract can be surmised by comparison to the value of Vermont's combined granite output in 1909: $2,811,744. In less than eight months, finished stone began arriving on site in Pennsylvania. In the second year of the contract, thirty one-piece columns, high, were quarried, finished, and delivered. The entire contract was fulfilled in 22 months—two months early. The general contractors, George F. Payne & Son, wrote the WGC to "express our great satisfaction at the manner in which you have handled your work, and think we can safely say, so far as the execution of the granite work is concerned, it was the quickest piece of work ever done." The WGCs reputation was made. ==Florescence==

George Bickford was both an excellent salesman and a competent administrator, notes Wood. He selected able managers who could be trusted to run the company while he was away selling its products. In 1903, the same year as the Pennsylvania Capitol contract, WGC began work at its Bethel White Quarry (still in operation) and also built a finishing shed in Bethel. Riding on its fame after the Pennsylvania Capitol success, WGC won a set of large building contracts, including the Cook County (Illinois) Courthouse (1906), the Wisconsin State Capitol (1907), the City Hall-County Building in Chicago (1908, including 36 columns high and in diameter—at the time the world's largest Corinthian orders), and the Bankers Trust Co. building, built in 1910 on the most expensive parcel of land in New York City. The company grew rapidly: it employed 132 people in 1900, which became 500 in 1905, and 800 in 1911. By 1914, WGC had a total of 1,400 employees in multiple quarries in Woodbury and Bethel and cutting and finishing plants in Hardwick, Bethel and Northfield. As of 1911, it had four million dollars of unfinished work on its books and had begun subcontracting work to other granite companies in Hardwick as well as to companies as far away as Concord, New Hampshire, and Westerly, Rhode Island. The last day of 1912 saw WGC's stone-setting crews working on these projects throughout the eastern United States: the Washington, D.C., Post Office; the Wisconsin State Capitol; the Miners Bank Building (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania); the Turk's Head Building (Providence, R.I.); the Northwest Mutual Life Building (Milwaukee, Wisconsin); and Soldiers & Sailors Memorials in Wichita, Kansas, Bloomington, Illinois, and Princeton, Illinois. By 1917, the company had supplied the granite for seven state capitol buildings: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Michigan, Iowa, Idaho, and Kansas. As the granite industry grew, it began to outstrip the local power supply. Although the WGC owned its own generation plant, it also bought electricity from the Village of Hardwick. In 1911, the electric lights in the village began to flicker at night; an investigation blamed the municipal generating station and proposed damming a nearby creek to provide a steady supply of water. At least one granite company, concerned about the reliability of the electric system, moved to a nearby town. The WGC, looking to expand its capacity, proposed to lease and operate the municipal power plants; the offer alarmed the owners of the other, smaller granite companies, but the management abilities of George Bickford were well known to the Village government, which approved a management contract in 1912. Fearful of the company's influence, the "old guard" of the village allied with the smaller granite operators, and a purchase option was struck from the management contract. When the contract expired in 1917, the world was a different place, and it was not renewed. In 1917, the WGC was capitalized at one million dollars, more money than the next seven Vermont granite companies combined. The company owned or controlled each of the elements of the chain needed to produce and deliver its product: quarries, the quarry railroad, and cutting plants, as well as the water rights, hydropower, and steam electric generating plants to power them, timberlands and a sawmill, a bank, piece-setting crews, and branch sales offices in New York, Chicago, and Washington. By controlling each step of the process, it could assure its ability to meet contract deadlines and estimate costs accurately—which further enabled it to win contracts and assure predictable profits. The company did not design buildings, but upon winning a contract, it assumed complete responsibility for a project, turning architectural drawings into designs for hundreds of cut stones, producing the stones, and sending crews to construction sites to assemble the stones. That same year, the company won a contract to build the Forest Lawn Memorial Park mausoleum in Maplewood, Minnesota. The showpiece of this structure is a 20-foot (6 m) wide bas-relief carving of the Last Supper in the style of Leonardo da Vinci's painting in the pediment. Four weeks were devoted to making the models for the piece, which was done by Purdy and his principal assistant. Another five weeks were consumed by the rough carving, and the faces, hair, hands, and clothing took ten weeks, although some of that time overlapped with the roughing-out. Also overlapping was the final carving with pneumatic tools, which was done for six weeks, with the final hand carving by the highest-paid carver lasting two weeks. The work was carved in four sections, which were crated, shipped, and installed in the front of the building between two smaller side pieces. ==Decline==

Wood notes that four factors can be seen to have combined to cause the decline of the Woodbury Granite Company. George H. Bickford died unexpectedly in 1914 at the age of 45 after appendicitis surgery. Building with granite slowed, and the Hardwick branch of the company became less active; in 1917, it suspended operations for a few months. Other granite cutters boasted that they used Woodbury stone, and the company was big enough that two of its products, Woodbury Gray and Bethel White, were used as comparisons in advertisements for other granite companies. However, the WGC struggled in competition with the established monument granite companies. The company was reorganized in 1927; W.C. Clifford was its president. The next year, however, F.L. Hardy became the company's president, and corporate headquarters were moved to Bennington. The final blow was the Great Depression, which saw a collapse in the economy in general, but in the market for luxury goods (such as mausoleums) in particular. Building granite was an unattainably extravagant product for nearly everybody, and the company had nothing else to sell. In 1935, the Woodbury Granite Company closed its operations and sold its finishing plant and its quarry facilities to John B. Hall & Associates. The company had been in business 48 years, and its decline had taken some two decades. ==Legacy==

In 1952, the company's Shed No. 1 burned down. The building was a total loss because granite sheds were built almost entirely of wood; once a fire became established, it was nearly impossible to extinguish. A few small-scale granite businesses continued to operate in Hardwick after 1952, but the loss of Woodbury Shed No. 1 marked the symbolic end of the town's granite industry. Although at least one Robeson Mountain quarry continues to operate, there are no operating granite finishing facilities left in Hardwick. Thanks to a revival of interest in granite furnishings, particularly in residential use, the Woodbury quarry (Latitude 44.4392°, Longitude -72.39391° (WGS84)) produces about of stone a year. The last surviving granite shed, Woodbury Granite Company's Shed No. 4, still stands in Hardwick. All of the others have been lost, principally to fire. Shed No. 4 has been empty for decades, in a state of arrested decay. There are plans to revive it as a community center. ==Buildings==

Buildings and structures built with stone supplied by the Woodbury Granite Company include: Forest Lawn Mausoleum, Maplewood, Minnesota State Memorial Building, Topeka, Kansas (base) Church of the Immaculate Conception, Minneapolis, Minnesota Pro-Cathedral, Minneapolis, Minnesota Carnegie Library, Syracuse, New York Connecticut State Library, Hartford, Connecticut Homeopathic Hospital, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Hotel Pontchartrain, Detroit, Michigan National Hotel, Rochester, New York Harry Payne Whitney Residence, New York, New York Mandell Residence, Boston, Massachusetts Mullane Residence, New York, New York Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Washington, D.C. ==References==