Tools and Machinery of the Granite Industry, Part II

Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association, Inc., The, Sep 2006 by Wood, Paul

As mentioned before, coastal quarries used coastal sloops or schooners (Figure 34) to ship to the major cities of the East Coast. Although some coastal schooners had four or five masts, most granite-hauling schooners had two or three masts. Some quarries used a "garymander" or "gallamander," a vehicle with two large wheels (up to twelve feet in diameter) pulled by oxen or horses, -to transport granite from the quarry to the schooners (Figure 35). The stone was suspended below the axle. A few inland quarries with a nearby canal could ship by canal barge. However, most inland quarries had to wait for the arrival of the railroad before they could be fully developed. The first quarry railroad, the Granite Railway at Quincy, Massachusetts, employed a horse-drawn rail car that carried a suspended granite block (Figure 36) . The principal granite-hauling railroad car was the standard flatcar, which at first was constructed mostly of wood and had a capacity of twenty to forty tons and later, as steel was used for the flatcars the capacity increased to up to one hundred tons.

For quarry railroads with moderate grades and gentle curves, a standard rod locomotive could be used. As the grade increased, a saddletank locomotive might be needed in which the locomotive water tank was draped directly over the drive wheels to increase traction (Figure 37). For the steepest grades (7 percent and more) and tight curves, it would have been necessary to use a geared locomotive in which small wheels (thirty-two to thirty-six inches in diameter) were used, all of which were driven (Figure 38). Ephraim Shay of Haring, Michigan, was issued a patent in 1881 for the geared locomotive in which the wheels were driven by vertically-oriented steam cylinders through a horizontal shaft with bevel gears, universal joints, and expansion couplings-allowing the wheel trucks to turn and follow the curved tracks and resulting in reduced track wear (Figure 39). The manufacturer was Lima Locomotive & Machine Co of Lima, Ohio. Shay locomotives, due to superior pulling power, had their principal application on steep-track lumbering and quarry operations. However, they were slow (twelve to fifteen miles per hour) and were used only where rod or saddletank locomotives were inadequate. By the 1950s, the diesel engine flatbed truck had become the primary granite transport from the quarry.

Quarry Pumping

Water from rain or snow melt, from wet drilling, and from underground water seepage ran down into a sump hole at the very bottom of the quarry. From there it was pumped with a sump pump up into a holding pond at the quarry edge. The water in the pond was then reused in wet drilling or to replenish water evaporated from steam engines. Hot water from a boiler and storage tank was used during the winter for drilling. Quarrying in the early spring would be carried out in the upper part of the quarry-away from the spring flooding in the lower part. Each day, this water had to be pumped out, and it often took until mid-morning before the bottom could be worked.