Vermont mining companies stay grounded

Vermont Business Magazine, Jan 1994 by Barna, Ed

At Rock of Ages, sales manager Robert Campo said exports were down this past year, and local-sales from the quarry were slow, so, "It really hasn't been a good year." The building trade has been, "very tough," he said, because, "nobody's putting up new buildings." An exception has been Bethel White, which, "has had an extremely good year," with 95 percent of the sales to Europe or the Far East.

"We laid off some of our people this year," said Campo, and there were retirement and unfilled vacancies, bringing the total number of Vermont employees to about 350. "You try to do it the most pleasant way you can," he said.

"It's not just with us," Campo said. "A lot of firms are getting leaner, and people are asked to do more. There's nothing wrong with that: sometimes you get fat and happy."

Chioldi Granite Corporation said they were too busy to be interviewed. At the Anderson-Firebug Company, which has about 50 employees, co-owner Robert Pope said, "There's a difficult market out there, but we're having a good year."

As Shattuck observed, the Barre-area companies are almost all small, family-run concerns. Pope said one way they have coped with foreign competition is by emphasizing full, personalized service.

If a monument is chipped, cracked, scratched, or otherwise damaged, it's hard to get it back to India to be repaired, Pope observed. "Whereas any of us doubtless would say "no problem, we'll take care of it," he said.

Pope said the past two or three years have indeed been difficult, with overcapacity resulting in price-cutting. However, "I think there are quite a few companies out there that are managing the downturn and doing quite well. They're probably working harder to do the same business they did five or six years ago, but they're surviving."

Shattuck said that from the Association's point-of-view, it would help if the state did more to promote granite. He observed that granite was not on a list of 25 industries the state recently targeted for economic development partnerships, something state officials told him happened because the list came from Washington.

"We've got 3,000 years of deposits of granite in Barre, Vermont, and yet we're not on the list for targeted economic development," Shattuck said. The state is "off chasing the same industries that every other state is chasing, and not taking advantage of the natural resources that are here in Vermont."

"But what bothers me most, I guess, is Act 250," Shattuck said. "We're getting bombarded by people. They'll move next to a quarry that's been there for 105 years and start complaining about the noise and want it shut down. That's the sentiment you have in this area."

SLATE

Chalk up the same complaint from the Slate Belt, a region eight to 10 miles wide from east and west, and about 25 miles long from north to south, on both sides of the Vermont-New York line. It is unique in holding green, purple, mottled and red slate, with the red in New York, plus small amounts of black slate.

Slate was found here in 1839, and became commercially significant when the railroad arrived in 1951. More than 100 quarries exist in the Fair Haven-Poultney-Pawlet-Castleton area, but most have been abandoned.