Rock Solid

Among New England’s many fans—tourists, historians, artists, writers—count geologists. They’re fascinated by the intense and numerous continental collisions and resulting lithic carnage that have taken place over the millennia right here, underneath our feet. New Englanders live atop one of the most complex landscapes anywhere. As geologist Charles F. Baker has written, “Forming a geologic history is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.  In the case of New England, it is as if the pieces, before being put together, were left out in the rain, become curled and faded, and then the dog chewed on them.”

This dog’s breakfast contains rocks like shale and schist, marble and puddingstone, limestone and quartzite, all of which began as sediments, mostly in ancient seas, rivers, and lakes. Yet underlying them all, born not in water but in fire, is granite, New England’s bedrock.  Formed deep in the earth’s crust, where pressure and heat make rock liquid, granite rises towards the surface and cools slowly, still miles underground.  As it does, its three main ingredients--quartz, feldspar, and mica—solidify into large crystals, which give the stone its name, from the Latin granum, meaning “grain.” The crystals also give granite its durability, something gravestone makers came to appreciate as they saw what the elements did to the slate and marble monuments of earlier generations. 

In the landscape, when the softer stone it above erodes away, the bedrock granite is exposed.  Where it was exposed, New Englanders stood ready to put it to use.  The glaciers had left enough broken pieces around to bequeath several generations’ worth of backs made sore by stone wall building, but when they weren’t heaving it out of the way, the colonists were hewing granite into hearths, thresholds, steps, and milestones. Working this hardest of stones was an ever-evolving challenge.  Early on, workers heated boulders and then dropped cannon balls on them; King’s Chapel was Boston’s first granite building, and its stones were fashioned this way.  Later, wooden wedges were driven into holes; as water was poured on them, their swelling would split the stone.

Granite’s durability tempted builders and architects to greater and grander projects.  Boston’s Quincy Market (1826) was a bold experiment in stone and glass 535 feet long; the now-gone Second Suffolk County Courthouse (1836) featured four Doric columns of solid Quincy granite, each weighing 64 tons.  They were hauled through the streets of the city on wagons drawn by 65 oxen and 12 horses.  Moving such heavy material spawned its own innovation:  the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument caused its builders to contrive the first commercial railway in the United States.  The Granite Railway of 1826 ran three miles, from the granite quarries at Quincy to the Neponset River in Milton, where barges awaited.  Access to water became a crucial criterion for quarries.  Halibut Point in Gloucester, now a state park, was once home to the thriving Babson Farm granite quarry.  In the late 19th century, Maine had more than 100 quarries along its coast and on its islands.

One of the biggest of them, in Vinalhaven, illustrates the confluence of geologic and human time.  Little did they know it, but the men who worked the quarry (which supplied the columns for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan) were digging into the deep core of   a 420 million-year-old volcano, one that was tilted on its side when a mini-continent called Avalonia collided with North America.  A few miles away, tourists drive up the famous scenic road to the East Coast’s highest point, Cadillac Mountain.  It and the other mountains on Mt. Desert Island are solid pink granite, once magma chambers miles underground, now uncovered by erosion and sculpted further by glaciers and fire.

Indeed, many of the region’s best-loved and most-climbed mountains—Maine’s Katahdin, Vermont’s Black, New Hampshire’s Chocorua—are “balds” of solid granite. Despite their heights, they’re really just nubs of ranges that were once as tall as the Himalayas, and as any climber can relate, there’s something magical about being atop such ancient rock.  Sometimes smooth as glass, sometimes scored by rocks dragged across it by a glacier, the granite holds the warm of the sun and invites the tired hiker to sit down and soak it up.

Although its heyday is in the past, New England’s granite industry is still quite active. Granites of America, headquartered in Smithfield, Rhode Island, runs several quarries, including one on Deer Isle in Maine and the Fletcher Granite facility in Westford, Massachusetts, which bills itself as the country’s longest continually quarried site (since 1881).  Fletcher supplies the famous Milford Pink, which was used on both the original Boston Public Library and Philip Johnson’s 1972 addition.  Swenson Granite, in Concord, New Hampshire, has been in the same family since 1883, and runs retail outlets around New England selling posts, benches, birdbaths, and steps; they also dig out some 400,000 cubic feet of granite for street curbing every year.

Ironically, given the embarrassment of riches beneath our feet and our kitchens, there’s not much demand for New England granite countertops.  Jim Gerrity, president of Gerrity Stone in Woburn, Massachusetts, says that it’s mostly about trends.  “For awhile it was blacks and greens,” he says. “Then it was earth tones, and now it’s whites.  And most of them come from overseas.”  Nonetheless, the company carries Milford Pink, Deer Isle (a delicately speckled gray), Stoney Creek (pink and black, from Connecticut), and Barre Gray (from the aptly named Rock of Ages quarry in Vermont).  Gerrity says that customers almost never ask where the stone they’re buying comes from.  With a few hundred million years of heritage below us, maybe it’s time to show some local pride when it comes to owning a piece of the rock.