Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
Speed was essential for workers in the marble industry. The faster a man could light fuses, the more valuable he was to the quarry’s owners. Courage was also indispensable. By the time he lit the last fuse, the first charge was getting ready to blow.
Ed Hooker, overseer of a marble quarry in southwestern Vermont, boasted that he had once lit 22 fuses before running for cover. “The first was one pretty near burnt when I touched the last,” he told a reporter, “and I wasn’t a hell of a ways out of the quarry when they began to pop.”
We often hear about how the quarrying industries — marble around Rutland and Dorset, granite around Barre — helped shape Vermont, but a century-old article from Scribner’s Magazine helps illuminate the thrill and danger, joy and drudgery of the lives of quarrymen.
The magazine hired local artist and journalist Edwin Burrage Child to write and illustrate the piece about Vermont’s marble quarries. The result was a ground-level view of the operation, an unusual approach in an era when the captains of industry were lionized.
In the article, Child, who lived part time in Dorset, doesn’t say who employs these laborers: he doesn’t have to. By 1905, when the article appeared, the Proctor family’s Vermont Marble Company held a virtual monopoly on marble in the state. Child doesn’t mention how marble had made the Proctors wealthy and helped land Redfield Proctor Sr. in the U.S. Senate, or even mention the Proctors at all. He is more interested in the nitty-gritty of the laborers’ work.
Child describes a blasting operation in which the foreman and an assistant take red-hot irons, which were heated by a blacksmith, and use them to ignite a series of 18 fuses. Then the men run for their lives to seek refuge with Child and the other men. “It was a bit thrilling,” Child writes, “the explosions following each other irregularly, tearing, wrenching, rending the ledges, filling the pit with booming, echoing thunder and flying rock, some pieces going sky-high and landing far up the mountain in the woods.”
For all the danger of the work, Child says the men appreciate the beauty that surrounds them. During the summer, he notes, the men leave the pits and caverns to eat their midday meal and take in the view of the valley that divides the Green Mountains and the Taconics. “They are not unconscious of the beauty of the place,” he writes. “‘Sightly’ they call it.”
But some days the men work with little sight of the outside world. Tucked inside the cavernous spaces carved into the rock, they labor in a gloom of steam and smoke. Child writes of standing within 10 feet of a group of men and listening to the “voices of busy contented men, or their united grunts as they heave together, prying at some stubborn stone.” Child can hear the men, but not actually see them.
Two horses are led into the cavern to haul out the rock. In the murk, they seem to be the same color. Only when they are back in daylight is it clear that one is black and one white.
The men fascinate Child, who takes pains to capture their dialects and pronunciation when quoting them. He mentions how the men call a French-Canadian named Alphonse Le Grande “Be Num,” their pronunciation of the French “bonne homme,” or “good man.”
Another laborer, Nathan Weeks, catches Child’s eye because of his white whiskers and slow movements. Weeks is an older man in a young man’s profession. You might think Weeks’ slowness would infuriate the other men. In this exhausting, dangerous job, it could mean he doesn’t do his fair share of the work or might get in the way after a fuse has been lit and every second counts. But Weeks is an old pro. He knows his work and can get more done, with less effort, than other men. “(H)e’s the best man in the quarry yet,” says one laborer.
While the workers in this quarry are almost all Yankees, Child says that at another site the men are a mix of Yankees, Italians, French (presumably French-Canadian), Irish and Poles. Despite their different backgrounds, the men work together well. The foreman apparently believes some of the stereotypes about foreigners being lazy, but says these men “all earn their day’s pay ’fore night comes.”
Much of the marble is extracted using black powder, because dynamite is less easily controlled and would turn the rock to powder, Child is told. Still, large slabs of the rock are carefully removed using wedges and sledgehammers.
Once the slab is removed, “it is loaded to start on its journey cityward, to be chiseled and shaped for the cornice, perhaps of the New York City Library” or another of the city’s sprouting skyscrapers. But one false swing of a sledgehammer, he writes, and a crack will snake across the rock’s face and make it a “useless boulder.”
The extracted marble slabs are gingerly hoisted onto a train car and prepared for the steep decline to the railroad station in the valley.
Hooker, the quarry overseer, jokes with Child: “You can ride if you want to. I won’t charge you no fare, and I won’t insure your life. If she should fetch loose, she’ll go hell bent for ’lection. There won’t be nothin’ stop her this side of Jericho. She never broke but once, and that was after she’d been running seventeen years. It’s near seventeen more now, and I shouldn’t wonder if somethin’ was about due.”
Danger is never far away. Though Hooker says he has never even had a man injured in a blast, that doesn’t mean that workers never die on the job. One man speaks matter-of-factly about how another worker had been crushed by falling rock.
“There’s lots of places in this here tunnel where I wouldn’t work, not for tew dollars a day,” explains a man identified only as “the Blacksmith.” Pointing to some rock slabs that jut from the cavern’s ceiling, the Blacksmith says, “Bill Jenkens was considerable flatted out a couple of years ago when a ton or two fell on him… We was comin’ out together, I was just a leetle ahead.” Jenkins was talking about the loose bits of scale that hung from the ceiling, then, ill-advisedly, tossed his drill at it. “‘Twas jest enough to start it, an’ gosh-fer-a-mighty, but if I wa’n’t close! It fanned my hair and ears, an’ de’ yer know his heart came aout jest like a piece of notepaper.” The rock fall that killed Jenkins knocked the Blacksmith unconscious.
Following the accident, workers chipped off loose pieces from the ceiling. The men were “pretty keerful for a while; but,” the Blacksmith adds philosophically, “that don’t last long nowheres.” Even in quarries, he seems to be saying, people take risks for granted.
At one point, Child asks the Blacksmith how far the marble stretches. “Clean acrost the valley,” he answers. “These maountains is all marble.” After spending days in the quarries, Child begins to envision Vermont the way the laborers do; this part of the green state that he knows is just a thin veneer over the white marble mountains beneath.
