Sep 12 2007
A dash of Gloucester granite to the stone wall
We made more progress on our stone wall this week.
A colleague and good friend of mine lives near some deserted granite quarries in Gloucester. After talking about the slow progress of our stone wall, she offered all the rocks I could fit in my car from the huge pile of rock and granite near the back of her property. I was amazed at all the deserted rough chunks of material from the old quarries, some of which was dug up during her yard projects and the rest which was just strewn about the area from past quarry operations.
After a little research, I discovered that Gloucester had a booming granite trade in the 19th and early 20th century, with over 25 small quarries around the Cape Ann peninsula. Once residents and businessmen realized that the precious stone could be quarried from the area, granite became another mainstay of the Gloucester economy, in addition to its fishing industry, until the 1930′s. However, there has been no major quarrying in the area since. Today, there is only one functioning quarry in the area.
According to the Annisquam Granite Company website, much of it is now “extinct, overgrown, paved over, filled with water, fenced off, taken for municipal property, buried under condo developments, or otherwise generally lost.” I also discovered that most of the granite for the Charlestown and Portsmouth Navy yards was from Gloucester.
I was like a kid in a candy shop. The only thing that stopped me was the need to prevent the tailpipe of my car all the way back to Amesbury from Cape Ann.
Once the rock and granite was safely back at our yard, it was time for a bit of wall reorganization. I took the pristine river and beach rock from the bottom middle rows (There’s only one row at this point) and used the Gloucester granite to take it’s place as base stone and filler. Then I started completing the final outside row. Now the bottom layer of the entire wall is almost finished.
I can also now brag that we have a stone wall made of famous Gloucester granite and finely smoothed sea and river rock.
(Sorry, no pictures. Did you really want to look at a pile of rocks?)
One response so far
Just thought you might care, there is a really cool park in Rockport called Halibut Point State Park (http://www.mass.gov/dcr/parks/northeast/halb.htm) that is based around an old granite quarry.