 Welcome to our very last lecture of the semester. Tomorrow summer will be here. We will see you all back here again in September and watch the mail and watch our website for information about the amazing lectures that will come. I want to tell you that if you have television, on April 27th at 4 p.m. or May 5th at 2 p.m., turn your TV to channel 17 and the program from last week will be there. Magic. So now Stephanie wants to say a few words about our trip. Very quick. We have a good group going. It's May 9th, a Wednesday. Bus leaves promptly at 8.30. So please park in the upper lot and be ready to board by 8.15. And that's the trip to Barrie. And we're looking forward to it. Thank you. And now the Honorable Peter will say a few words. Hello everyone. When I made my announcement to leave, the words that I used was seriously considering a relocation as opposed to the, I am moving, but it's very possible. Anyway, this summer, every Saturday I will be a vendor at the Shelburne Farmers Market offering prints of my paintings. And if you're in Brattleboro for the entire month of June, I have a 40-foot wall in the River Garden Pavilion, which I'm going to plaster with original oil paintings. And if that's not enough, June 2nd during the strolling of the Heffers, which is not the running of the Mad Bulls, I will be a vendor at the Slow Living Expo. And one last thing, I'll be playing every Thursday this summer with the Onion River Band in Basin Harbor. So you're not done with me just quite yet. Thank you. We will miss you, Peter. Now, Beth will introduce our speaker. Could I ask everyone to please turn off their cell phones and devices? It's a pleasure today to welcome Dr. Scott McLaughlin. Since 1986, he has been an educator, a museum professional, and an archaeologist, working mainly with the UVM Consulting Archaeologist Program and with the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum. He also has been a lecturer in the History Department at the University of Vermont. He's currently the Executive Director of the Vermont Granite Museum in Barrie. And as has been mentioned, this lecture will serve as a really nice introduction for those of you who are going on the field trip there in May. And for those of you who are unable to go, this will be a nice sort of armchair introduction to the highlights of the exhibition there. So it's a real pleasure to welcome Scott McLaughlin. Be hot? Yes, okay. Thank you very much for coming out today. And just to let you know, I looked at my cell phone earlier today and it looks like that when you're there for the field trip at the museum, we're supposed to have beautiful weather. However, over the next week, not so much. It looks like rain for at least the next six days. Lights. So just to give you a little bit of background to the Vermont Granite Museum, it's a relatively new venture. The community got together in 1994, about 250 of them at the Barrie Opera House, and they were trying to solve a number of different problems they saw confronting their community. One was an economic issue. The downtown area was quite depressed. Many of the building storefronts were empty. There were a lot of empty also apartment buildings. And it had a lot to do with the fact that the industry has been consolidating over the previous two decades. The other issue that was seen largely by the seniors in the community was that there was a lack of social cohesion, which they had experienced during their youth. And they attributed that to the fact that many of the folks that were part of that granite industry had moved away. There were newcomers. And the social organizations that they once went to with their parents and grandparents really lost their memberships and dissolved. The third thing that they recognized was the fact that the kids that were coming out of the schools didn't really know much about Vermont history, and most importantly, the granite industry's history to the central Vermont area. And so they thought somehow we need to solve these issues and they came to the, all to the same conclusion, was that we need to create a heritage center. And that heritage center can help to explain the importance that the granite industry has served, not just to central Vermont or even the state of Vermont, but at a national level. And so that's how the granite museum was born. It took a while for them to acquire a building. By 1998, they had this structure. This is the front of the building. It is 300 feet long and it's about 27,000 square feet. It's the old Jones Brothers granite plant. It's a beautiful structure, but not when they acquired it. When they bought it, it was falling down. It was a mess. They spent millions of dollars in rehabbing the structure with the support of the National Park Service, State of Vermont, and also the City of Barrie. And philanthropists around the state as well. The granite industry also saw this as a real benefit to them moving forward into the future. Being able to highlight the significant pieces that the granite industry of Vermont had produced over the past century and a quarter was really significant to them. To make sure that they kept those alliances and ties with the memorial dealers and municipalities across the United States that wanted to take and commemorate something within their communities. So it took a little while to finish the rehab. By 2003, they were able to open up a section of the building and then they struggled to try to create exhibit content for within it. And in 2014, I was hired as a consultant to assist in the process of trying to figure out how do we move this forward from being fairly small exhibits and infrequent hours for opening for the public and really turn into what it should be, which is a must-see stop when you come to Vermont. And so I laid out a plan in 2014 and in 2015 the board of directors hired me to complete it. They thought, well, if I'm so smart, then go ahead and try it. And so I took on the challenge. And I knew I could do it because I had worked at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum since the second year that they opened. And I get to see it grow from one building to 19, going from a staff of just a handful of people to one that had over 50 people annually, paid staff. And I also helped to develop the Mount Independence Visitor Center with Audrey Porsche, as well as Chimney Point State Historic Site. And so with that background I thought, why not take on a new challenge? And it has been challenging, but it's also been something that has brought in a lot of community members and their support. On an annual basis I have no fewer than 45 volunteers to assist me almost on a weekly basis. I'm the only paid employee. So if you come to our opening event, which is May 5th, there's a flyer out here on the table as you leave the room on the right. You'll see just how probably much it's changed if you think of it as just bare bones and dirt floor. And then everything else in the middle is us, what we've done in the last three years. So this is completely new history to me. Since I started working with prehistoric archaeology at UVM and then doing Maritime History with the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, I'd never done much with the way I probably should have in terms of industrial history. I taught the Vermont History course for Donna Brown one semester at UVM, and I think I addressed the Grand Indian Industry and the unions in Vermont in maybe 20 minutes. So the last three years has been a tremendous learning experience for me. Working alongside my volunteers, many of which started their careers in their late teens and 20s in the Grand Indian History and worked there for over 40 years. There's a lot left to learn, but what I'm going to do is give you a very, very brief history of the Granite Cutter story, focusing on those working in Vermont. This is a typical scene you would see in the 1890s through the 1920s in the Granite Quarries. Literally hundreds of men working in deep pits, but that is well into the story. And this story that I want to tell you can be told in three different ways. One is I could present it as a very unique story to America, something that you won't find anywhere else within the United States. I could also present it as being unique, but also having a lot of parallels with the immigrant story of all Americans outside of Native Americans. And then we can also talk about it lying someplace in the middle. And I'm one of those guys that doesn't like the extremes. I often take the middle of the road, and so that's where we're going to approach it. But I just want to point out that there's some really clear elements to making this as a very unique story to America. First of all, our geography, as we all know. We've got this one season that many places don't have, except for those that are in the area. We have three saw cycles. We've got the mud season, and I've experienced, I'm on a dirt road that's two miles out, so it was fun getting home every once in a while with a Subaru. Definitely use that all-wheel drive. And there's also other unique experiences within Vermont's geography as well. Our mountainous terrain, our divides between communities, deep river valleys, in terms of the forested environments are unique across the landscape. All those are going to play a role in how the granite industry develops, and the hindrances that occur throughout the 19th and 20th century. Things we still are having to do it today. The other thing that makes it arguably unique is the fact that you're looking at all these different cultural groups that are coming to work in the granite industry. They come to this region with their own cultural backgrounds, personal experiences, things that make them a unique character in the development of the granite industry. And no two people are alike, and no two communities are exactly alike. In terms of this idea that is representative of America, all this migration to the state of Vermont to work in the granite industry is something that is being experienced all across the United States and Canada. Immigrants coming from Europe and trying to find an economic footing for themselves and their families, and they're all navigating trying to figure out how to find their place within the American society or culture. They're having to figure out what is it they're willing to give up of what they had learned from their parents and grandparents and from their communities from Europe, and what is it that they desperately want to retain. And if you go to Barrie today, you'll often find families eating muscacholi and chicken. It's like the Italian dish. They're not willing to let go of that. And so food waste is, in fact, things that are really difficult to let go of. It's what grandma taught you, and you're going to continue to like it, no matter what. And you've got to force-feed it to your children and grandchildren. So I like this lie in the middle. I like the idea that there's definitely some unique characteristics when it comes to the cultural adaptation of community members from Europe. There's some unique elements that they have to blend with the English heritage we have here in the state of Vermont. If you look at populations pre-Civil War, it's almost all from the United Kingdom and a few French smattering here and there and Native Americans. But then following the second half of the 19th century, it starts becoming widely culturally diverse in some areas throughout the state and certainly will be the Granite towns. And so this blending of ideas and community members and backgrounds ends up developing these subcultures throughout the state. And if you go to, say, the Slate Valley region and the southwestern part of the state, you'll find the well-sure there in very large numbers. They bring their food waste or technologies, their language to their work of every day, and that just permeates their communities. Their land plots and their buildings that they live in, the structures that they work in, they all are unique. They have vestiges going back to their homeland. And so if we look at the Granite industry, we see also something like that happening, but it's a lot more diverse than some other communities throughout the state. You've got the Italians, mostly northern Italians. You have the French Canadians. You have the Scots. You have the Swedes, the Norwegians, the Spanish. They're all coming to the region in order to either work directly in the Granite industry or they're trying to provide allied industries that are going to support the Granite industry as it grows throughout the 19th and 20th century. So where does this story lie? Well, it's not all across the entire state, but it's certainly not in one region. Today we think of Barry as being the hub and it has done well to purport itself as being the granite capital of the world since the early 1900s. And so it's sort of ingrained within Vermont folklore and knowledge that that's it. Well, that's not it. As I investigate the story in greater detail, I'm finding out that all along the eastern side of the state of Vermont, you find areas that there are quarry and granite going all the way back to the pre-Revolutionary War era. And everything represented in red here, this is all granite. So from Vernon all the way to near Newport, you've got quarry sites that are being opened up during the late colonial and into the early Republic era of the United States. And they're all after the resource for the same reason. They're after it because it's a basic raw material to work with. In terms of the communities that have the largest quarry sites, I just created a general list from the state geologist reports, which are a wealth of information for someone like me. And so this is a basic list of where the material is coming from. It's heavy. It's 167 pounds per cubic foot. So I don't ask most of my volunteers to even pick up something small in granite because most of my senior volunteers couldn't and I wouldn't expect them to try. And so this material, if you want to shape it, you want to do it as close to the quarry site as possible. But that doesn't mean you can't use a transportation like railroads to bring that raw material to a site like the Burlington Waterfront, where there was shaping of granite done by the Marble Works. All these early discoveries of the sources of granite within the state outside of Native Americans, there are after materials for one major thing, and that's millstones. As these late colonials and those moving in after the American Revolutionary War, they're most interested in making sure that they have bread on the table every day. And the only way you're going to do that is you've got to have to some way grind your grain, turn it into a material that you can utilize. And so these early settlers, they would strip their land and they would immediately want to take whatever winter wheat they might grow and other materials around the stumps of these trees and take it to a mill site. Many of them had some basic experience or knowledge of how mills operated, and they often went and tried to make their own mill. It doesn't take very long though. They realized that in order to do large quantities of grain, you're going to have to have a true mill. And you need a mill right. You need someone who has the basic, more than basic experience in how to make millstones and how to operate a sufficient mill so the grain is ground efficiently and the material isn't filled full of grit. Who wants grit in their mill? Not I. So the first commercial operations that open up are where the best sources of granite are found. And these are commercial operations. This isn't just a farmer going out trying to develop a millstone for their own personal use or just their basic community. And the first commercial operations occur is called Cobble Hill in Barrie. And the operators are ones that are just trying to get the material out as quickly as possible. And the most efficient method was to find an outcropping, like the picture here on the right, and just start burrowing into it until you get some material that's useful for you. It produces a tremendous amount of waste, but ultimately it does the deed. It makes you possible to have millstones that are of good enough quality so you can ship them over a wider region. And in this era of the early 19th century, there's basic road systems, but the only way you're going to move it across the landscape is you wait until it freezes solid and it's covered with snow. And it's capable to take and put those heavy millstones onto a sledge and have a couple of oxen or horses or mule team in order to tow it to its destination. And we know from some basic research that the millstones that are coming from Cobble Hill are traveling all around Central Vermont, and every once in a while they'll even go to New Hampshire and they'll also go to New York State on the other side of Lake Champlain. So that's the first commercial quarry. The other quarries that will open up within Vermont are often opened up by a professional that has come from elsewhere within New England. They have learned that there's population densities that are increasing within the state of Vermont, and it makes perfect sense for them to go start a business. And so, most likely, it's not the owner of a mill in Northern New England. Instead, it's the second in charge or third in charge, and he's looking for a way to make more money, a better lifestyle for him and his family, and so he's the one who moves to Vermont and establishes a business. Well, if you're quarrying stone, as I mentioned, there's a lot of waste material that doesn't work well for millstones, but what could you use that material for? Well, you can use it for those that have got a little cash in their pocket and are interested in building a house out of brick instead of wood. They would like to take and surface the outside of their building at the skirt, the underpinnings with granite, put lentils and steps out of granite within their home. This is a great example of a Vermont home made with granite. And after the Civil War period, you start to see the use of barbed wire everywhere throughout the United States, and the best way in which to support that barbed wire is not through wooden posts at the corners, but instead is by something very heavy that's not going to fall over or not rot away, and so granite fence posts is a good choice. Communities as they develop throughout New England, they're having to deal with muddy dirt roads throughout much of the season, every time it rains and certainly during the spring, and if you want to get rid of those, you can pave your streets with brick, but unfortunately brick doesn't last very long. If you can do it with stone, you're better off. And so even before the railroads arrive in our region in 1849, we start to see paving stones being shipped out by small loads, so pretty impressive. All this work is being done by hand. There is no mechanized process during the pre-Civil War era. Instead, it's largely two guys that are doing much of the quarrying as a team, and so one guy gets the unfortunate task of holding the bit, and the other one gets to hit it with a hammer. So I don't know how many of them broke their arm, but I'm sure just the ringing of your hand after a while was enough, and then the process after drilling the hole would be to take and split it, shoving wedges down inside that hole and then pounding a chunk of steel down the middle and trying to split it apart. And this process changes slightly over time. There's a little difference between the wedgings, but ultimately it's the same process, largely by hand. It's a second wave of migration that comes to Vermont during the middle of the 19th century that begins to change the granite industry. And these are people that are experienced working in quarries in the United Kingdom, and they've got techniques that are tried and true. They've been using for, in some cases, hundreds of years things that weren't necessarily known to the early quarriers here in the state of Vermont, and they completely changed the industry with the use of certain types of technologies. One is dynamite the top. Get rid of all that waste material that you don't want that's been weathered away by our glaciers and just natural weathering, freeze-thaw cycles, things like that, and strip that and then start working down through the good-quality material in layers. Granite actually has kind of like, think of an onion kind of look to it. That's actually what it is when it forms deep within the Earth's surface. It cools from the outside in, and so it's got these layers, and the crystal structure is actually aligned as it cools. So it has a head grain, the pointy part, and then it has a side grain, which is nice and flat and smooth for all those crystals that makes up the granite, which is largely quartz and feldspar. So these experts come and they turn it from being a modest industry into one that's significantly larger. And one of the things they do is they start to market the product to municipalities and also to state government. And our capital is made out of berry gray granite, and it's a very, very good sales pitch when you talk about the fact that it burned, and the only thing that was destroyed was the wooden structure that was inside. The rest of the structure was completely intact, no damage to it whatsoever. And so if you're talking to someone who is interested in the long-term investment of a community, you want to build a granite. But granite is heavy, and so if you want to market more than just beyond your particular region, then you're going to have to do it through a means of transportation that makes it cheap to move. And the railroads make that argument pretty easy to think about selling your product all throughout the Northeast. The railroads arrived in 1849, but if you know anything about Vermont railroad history or railroad history in general across America is whoever's in charge of the railroad commission ultimately decides where the railroad goes and if they live in a town, guess what? It's going to go through their town. And unfortunately, no one on the commission lived in Barrie or many of these other granite communities throughout the state. And so they were skirted by the railroad. And eventually they'll develop spur lines that go from the main trunk lines to the quarry sites, but it'll take a while for many. But at least you can go just a shorter distance with your teams of oxen and teams of mules and you don't have to go quite so far. And you can market to the entire Northeast. A third weight of migration comes to the state of Vermont at the end of the 19th, early 20th century. And it consists of folks both from the United Kingdom but largely from other areas within Europe. Some from Northern Europe, Scandinavia. Some from the Mediterranean region and a few from the interior like Germany. And they're coming to the state of Vermont, not just to work in the granite industry but they're coming here because they're looking for some sort of economic benefit for their community. They're coming as groups. They're not coming necessarily as individuals. And they're coming here hoping that they can develop a new life for themselves. Some of them have some background knowledge in working in stone, especially Norwegians and Swedes. They not only have an agricultural background but they've also worked in stone because they've got to move this stuff around and split it and get it out of their way. Their countries are covered by glacial till, like Vermont. And you've got those that are coming from Italy and Switzerland and they too have worked in stone. And much of this involves a chain migration. So the first come here, they work in the industry and they're like, this is a great place to live. There's plenty of opportunity to grow both in terms of your expertise and your occupation but also in terms of the economics and your survivability for your particular family. The Italians and Swiss do a great deal to change the granite industry. Where the industry beginning in the 19th century was focusing on architectural elements and millstones. The Italians and Swedes say, this could be used for other things and namely it could be used for sculpture. There is a possibility. It's time consuming and expensive but there's a market, a growing one in the United States because there's a lot of wealthy individuals. They've got pockets full of cash and they would love to commemorate themselves in their cemeteries with mausoleums covered with art. They're also interested in decorating their commercial buildings and also they're willing to take and fund the decoration of public structures. These Italians, they start off coming to Vermont not to work in the granite industry but the marble industry and they're stolen from Proctor. They're brought to places like Barry and Northfield and other locations, Hardwick, Bethel in order to work the stone. It doesn't make the marble industry very happy but for those that moved to work in the marble industry they were much more satisfied with the communities that they were developing in the industries or the communities around the granite industry than what they saw in Proctor. Proctor is a company town. The Proctor family owned everything. The stores, the housing, the businesses that you worked in and if you look at where these people are coming from Italy and Switzerland during the late 19th century was a socialist area. Now these people had ideas of building a completely different political system than what Mr. Proctor wanted. He wanted control over everything and that was not something that some people were willing to take and alter about themselves. So politically they couldn't do it and so they would move. In terms of the Swedes that came they've got an interesting story. They came because there was a marketing effort by the state of Vermont. They wanted to colonize our upland farms all throughout the state which are largely being vacated by folks that realized they weren't working the land and making any money at all. It doesn't sound much different than today but they wanted to take and figure out what can I do with this property now that it's no longer of much value as farmland. You've got competition from the Midwest that can produce really cheap grains send it by train to the east coast. There's no point in competing. You just can't sell it at market in your own community any cheaper than you could of the stuff that's coming from the Midwest. But the Vermont government thought that well these Swedes and Norwegians and others from Scandinavia they're used to working in glacial dill. Now they wouldn't mind and if we give them a little incentive by giving them money for seed and plows and giving them some cash for their land and just expect them to say a few years then we'll be able to build a new stock and they're really close to the New England Yankee stock anyways. That was their argument. Well when they got here they were like this is no better than home. It's like why am I going to work this land? So what they do they found other work and many of them found work in places like BB where the granite quarries and granite sheds were located and they came to work there instead. And again they have some knowledge of granite some better than others. If you're going to be in business you've got to constantly think about the new product lines you have to come out with in order to serve a changing marketplace. And the granite industry is constantly reinventing itself throughout the 19th century and at the end of the 1800's you'll start to see them move towards the monuments thanks to the Italians and Swedes who were introducing them to the concepts of how to work the stone and in the round three dimensional objects and then they start producing things for a new marketplace. Lawn rollers. Sounds kind of odd. Why would you want to roll your lawn? Well most people didn't have lawns until the 1880's. Instead you use your lawn space both front and back yard to graze your chickens, your pigs, your sheep and when you had your garbage 1840's and earlier you'd throw it in the front yard and after the 1840's you'd go to the back yard and throw it on the lawn and then by the time you get 1870's you start saying well maybe it's a good idea to throw my garbage into a hole in the ground and then I'll cover it up and hope the kids don't fall in. Well if you're going to create a lawn you've got to have a smooth surface and so you can drag it a little bit but you're definitely going to have to compact it and so they use granite rollers and the technology that made that possible was this. This is a lathe. Massive. Some of these rollers will lay up to 100,000 pounds and you can cut these into segments break them apart and turn them into lawn rollers but this is a press roll. At the end of the 19th century you've got paper pulp that's being used to make paper and so that material needs to be squeezed in order to get all the water out of it and create a really dense material and so imagine two of these rollers one on top of the other and the paper pulp squeezing between and then put 10 more series all the way after it and by the time you get to the very end the material that is dense equal in thickness from one edge to the other and the perfect material for writing on and so these rollers start being produced here locally in the state and then being shipped all across the US in Canada. You can also make things like urns and other turned objects columns and all this has to do with the fact that you've got not only those that know how to work granite but you also have the machine industry that's developing in parallel right here in the state of Vermont. You've got a great source of iron ore in the Adirondacks it can be easily brought over by road railroad or by boats and then it can be turned into finished tool products right here in the state. So Rutland Berrymount Pillar area have foundries they're turning that stuff into usable products and it makes perfect sense if you've got a problem you just turn to the machinist and say here it is I want to solve this issue come up with a machine make it happen for me. Just to give you an idea of how fast the granite industry grows so from 1820s to 1880 it goes from 1 to 12 companies not a great deal of progress in terms of size in terms of the amount of money to be made 1.2 million of modern dollars per year not a great deal Vermont is producing far more the way of agricultural products and lumber during this era than it is making granite material so things will though change so from 1880 to the 1920s it'll go up to about 350 granite manufacturers in the state of Vermont so it doesn't take long 40 years and just escalates and that's because of those spur lines I mentioned earlier getting you right into the interior right to the quarry site so the blocks can be simply lifted out of the hole and set directly onto a flat car and probably the most important spur line will be what's called the Berry Sky Route and it is an amazing railroad as it zigzags its way all the way up to Millstone Hill back and forth these switchbacks and it must have been a treacherous ride for the first railroads the engineers probably had white knuckles going all the way down the hill with their load but they made it possible so you didn't have to bring all the blocks down by mule trains and you could take up bigger and bigger pieces as time progresses as the railroad flat cars get modified not by railroad interest across the U.S. but right here in the state of Vermont new technologies made by those machinists here in the state there's hundreds of machines that are patented by Vermont inventors to work in the marble and granite industries and although marble is very soft about three on the hardness scale granite being 6.7 and harder diamond being 10 it means that some of these machines got abused pretty heavily but there were a possible transition from marble to granite with relative ease another thing that would make it possible to increase levels of production is the fact that you've got a constant supply of energy they relied heavily upon water power initially but by the end of the 19th century the first places in communities throughout the eastern side of the state that will get power, electric power will be the granite plants they want that power so they can operate more efficiently and make sure that they have a consistent power source there's also beg borrow and stealing from all kinds of industries both here in the United States and Canada but also within Europe pneumatic tools will be something that we see levels of interest in, elsewhere going all the way back to the early 1800s but to apply them to working stone that's done here there's an argument between is it granite city tool in berry or is it trial and holden who created the first pneumatic hammers that includes jack hammers that we see and also the small pneumatic hammers that are used to sculpt granite and marble so a lot of different things that are being modified and in some cases like the jack hammer there's no patents no early patents by either one of those companies because they were interested in producing products as quickly as possible to get it into the marketplace to make money and so a lot of that history unfortunately is now lost because nobody recorded it another feature that is created here in the state of Vermont is the development of what's called the long shed also called the runaway shed and it's called the runaway shed because on top of these rails is a crane and once electrified that would run down the length at pretty good speed and if you weren't careful as an operator you could run it right off the rails at the far end despite the fact that there were chalks down there and the reason why it would run off is because of the momentum of a big block of granite underneath the crane and it would just carry you right through the building these buildings are unfortunately disastrous for the granite industry from the 1890s through the 1930s and that the workers died from what's called silicosis those pneumatic hammers and all those other machines that polished and created surfaces on the granite there's a tremendous amount of dust so much dust that you probably couldn't see more than 20 feet in front of you when walking down the granite plant when it was in full operation and that granite dust once breathed in was like breathing in little shards of glass those pieces of silica which is potentially what we make glass out of you know breathe those in they'll stick right into your lung tissue they create scar tissue within your lung they never leave it's difficult to cough any of them up especially once scar tissue develops over it's impossible and it limits the amount of oxygen you can absorb into your system and so some of these workers would go from 100% lung capacity when they entered the building and 15 years later they'd be down to 10 to 15% and so pictured here in Hope Cemetery is one of those granite workers piece carved for him and so it takes a while for the granite industry to recognize that there is solutions to this problem and the solution that they came up with initially was not going to work which was to send them to the asylum in town where people had contagious diseases like diphtheria, tuberculosis, influenza those were death sentences for these men any of them that stayed home in the asylum they likely survived longer but without the oxygen packs and things like that we see today with people with long issues have they didn't have those capabilities the issue was how do you get the dust out well you put in a vacuum system you put that at every single one or worker's stations and that will help to remove that dust it may reduce it down to maybe 10 5% of the amount of dust that you typically would see without it and these guys could survive they could work out their career lasting 40 years well it's during this era we see the granite industry struggling with the death of so many of the men and trying to figure out how do we keep up with the pace of the growth of the granite industry and it explodes after 1920 in any cemetery in the state of Vermont you'll see a lot of marble headstones none of them date after 1920 they're all granites so there's a struggle right at the turn of the century who's marketing the material better and you can't resist when someone tells you this will last forever that's the granite the marble is only going to last maybe a century and by the 1910s there's some of those early headstones from the late colonial era that are already disappearing and so all you need to do is look in your cemetery the populations that are moving into the United States at the beginning of the 20th century these are folks that are fleeing from conflicts warfare within Europe World War I, World War II and most don't have technical experiences that some of the previous generations had in the work of stone but they're hard workers they're willing to learn and they want to create a new home for themselves and their family and so they're desperate and they're willing to take and create risks that other generations may not have been willing to do they're willing to create companies and see them fall and then rebuild time and time again and they're trying to find a niche if you're going to work in the granite industry what are you going to produce that's different than your neighbor and so it starts opening up in terms of the products things like surface plates just a big slab of granite incredibly smooth very very level millions of an inch in terms of variation from one section to the other and you can use these in industry there's a lot of templates for sophisticated pieces of machinery like telescopes and microscopes they're really critical to the development of the auto industry aircraft industry and they're still used out there by machinists all across the world you can't replace them with any other material granite is the best skyscrapers start popping up all over the place you need to cover those steel structures with some sort of material and it's not going to be wood and so granite is the best material of choice the early ones are covered with marble and a century now later those are having problems and being replaced with baffle white granite I hear from Vermont there's a huge marketing effort that's taking place during the 20th century you've got now memorial dealers in little towns all across North America and so the granite industry is sending folks out there in order to convince essentially memorial dealers and undertakers that their product is the best sell arts, push our material will give you a kickback when you do so and that's what really helps for the industry to grow the other thing is that there's all sorts of technologies that are being developed locally and outside of our region that are having an impact one is sandblasting of both letters and finally decorations that can be done fairly quickly so that everyone can afford some decorations to a monument that they might put in their cemetery to commemorate a loved one in the past it was fairly easy to carve in marble when you start working towards granite it gets more complex, more expensive but if you can sandblast it in there it can be done relatively inexpensively and so you start seeing in the 1920s and 30s this introduction of things like the Berry Rose which is carved right in there with the abrasive materials and this is really what our region is best known for in terms of decoration although we have great sculptors that can turn things in the round this is really what we sell literally hundreds of thousands of throughout the 20th century and the first thing that's happening is we start to see trucks being introduced to the transportation network it's great on this end when you have to move things around town and you have to move it from quarry sites to sheds when it's small material but most importantly those trucks are important on the other end think about those small little memorial dealers that are often on Timbuktu and it's a long ways from the rail line they're like I don't think we're going to get anything big it's just got to be small it's too expensive to transport start putting trucks in the transportation network and all of a sudden the transportation cost drops and now we're going to think about ordering things that are larger, more decorative we've got more that we can offer and finally the late 1930s the technology that will ultimately have the most impact on the workers is the dust removal systems the dust removal something that is advocated by the granite cutters themselves remember many of the Italian Swedes are socialists in their perspective on the world and when they come to Vermont actually they like it a great deal one of the things we do every single year is we have town meeting it's when we gather together to decide how we want to take and govern ourselves in the years to come that's what they like as a political concept and also the anarchist movement in Italy as well is being brought it's a little different but they still find some familiarity and something that they like about the way we govern here in Vermont and throughout New England and they almost immediately start putting in place unions in order to protect the granite workers it's something that they had in Europe it's something that they want to see here as well and in the 1880s they start looking out for the granite workers in terms of not their protection but how much money they can make they're looking at their pay and they start working whittling away at all those other things that they find problematic and one of those things is trying to figure out how do we secure ourselves in our positions and there are strikes and here in the state of Vermont there's not many of them a large number of them are in the granite workers and unfortunately the state of Vermont in terms of our government officials, especially during the 1920s and 30s didn't look kindly upon unions and what they ended up doing was pushing back and allowing strike breakers to come in and these are the French Canadians the granite companies represented by the Barry Granite Association they decided to go to Quebec easy outside source for labor and get every single farm hand that was interested in making more money than they currently were and bring them to communities like Barry and the strike of 1933 is one that has a huge impact on the industry you have strikers that are being brought in by the National Guard both the Adjutant General and also our Governor was supportive of the granite companies they had investments in them and had friends and they fought tooth and nail to try to squash the community that was uprising which in many cases was the focus of Barry Barry was very different than the rest of the state of Vermont outside of the other granite communities and here in this case the National Guard is patrolling down the streets and unfortunately tear gas some folks not granite workers in one of the streets when you look through the local newspapers there's very little mention of the granite strike of 1933 but instead I went to the Boston Globe the Washington Post New York Times they're sending reporters to Vermont to tell the rest of the United States what's happening within our communities and it's not really a pleasant experience for the granite workers or the rest of the community within Barry and the reason why we see the grand difference between the rest of the state and what we see in Barry see the blue line that represents foreign born within the community here we are 1920 38% is foreign born now large number of immigrants to come to work either in the allied industries that are supporting the granite industry or the granite industry directly and here is the United States and the rest of the state of Vermont it's like and today it's dropped a little bit more but it's pretty much stayed constant so this community was a group of outsiders that didn't really represent the New England feel of the rest of the state and the post-war war two era we'll see the granite industry working on trying to balance between worker safety and production and the worker safety is something that is becoming more important to the union members the Muto Society and other groups within especially Barry that are supporting the growing elders in the community both Italian and non-Italian is really important to them and they work together with the granite unions in order to push for protections and what they're really trying to do is make it safe enough so they don't have to worry about their sons working in the granite industry in the previous generation before 1938 when the duck systems were installed I hear again and again the stories of dad and mom say don't go into the granite industry but once the ducks are installed then it's safe then it's a good paying job it's worth trying to experiment with it see if you like it there's some protections within it that are not offered to other occupations within the state today we continue to work in the granite industry toward making it safer and safer but they're also worried about production because you've got competition not just within the state but you have other granite regions throughout North America you've got Georgia, Minnesota, Colorado that has high quality granite that's being used for monuments they have a very similar history to the one here in Barrie in terms of the immigrant populations and the technologies that are involved also another thing that the granite industry is struggling with is reducing labor cost in the post-war war two era and that's like all other industries how do you get those costs down so you can compete with a national and an international market and one of those things again is something that came about here in Barrie is the use of tungsten carbide steel in all the tools every one of these granite plants had at least one blacksmith shop right next door that blacksmith shop was working every day that they were working in the shed because all those steel tools in many cases they're as hard or just a little softer than the actual granite so they dull down rapidly you'd have to send them to the blacksmith shop every few days in order to get repointed well if you put carbide steel in there that's harder than granite it eliminates the need for the blacksmith so from the time the carbide steel was introduced in the 1950s to 1965 every one of those blacksmiths were put out of work but you reduce some labor cost you can keep those men working they don't have to keep switching out bits things like that other technologies that are experimented with here in town and berry will be things like diamond wire so earlier on it was a twisted wire and it pulled an abrasive through well why not take and embed diamonds within the wire matrix now you don't have to worry about an abrasive material much of it gets spit off and ends up being part of the sludge instead of with a diamond wire they're right in there within that wire they're not going to be loosened up they're constantly cut right through making it faster and more effective straighter lines, things of that nature and today we're down to now things like hydro splitters and laser etching so these big machines that will split the blocks of granite that are several feet thick and so you can work with bigger and bigger pieces breaking them down mechanically very rapidly working into the 21st century we start to see more and more consolidation we start at a peak at about 350 across the state almost 150 of them are in the Barry Montpelier area and then they just keep decreasing in number the amount of production increases all through the time of consolidation right to the very present you also see a variety being offered you can get raw materials from around the globe or throughout North America to the location of sheds we've got highly qualified technicians that can turn that into finished products that the marketplace wants and so importing granites becomes a big piece of what you can offer and that begins in 1890s a lot of that granite that comes in the 1890s is ballast from around the globe in sailing ships when it gets here to the east coast you throw off the granite into the port of Portsmouth Boston Philadelphia and then you load on something that is heavy pig iron something that is of value to the countries that you're sailing to next and so those imported granites get introduced early but they become more and more important to sales here in the state of Vermont improve technologies that's computers a lot of the early tools they had to have a computer there 24-7 you couldn't leave the thing and eventually with the introduction of computers and lasers in the 1980s you'll start to see machines being able to operate themselves you can walk away and come back the next morning and look it's done well today you can not only load the machine and walk away but the machine will change its own tool heads and do a number of different tasks you've got one machine now replacing in some cases three and four machines and the factories themselves are no longer the typical long shed of the past instead they're like the craftsman shop here at Rock of Ages very modern structures LED lighting and overhead cranes that are operated from the floor by joysticks and the level of risk is decreasing for the workers even more than it was in the past because you've got buildings now that have ventilation systems that recycle all of the air within the structure so all that dust is taken out and you have vacuums at your workstation if necessary but there's still some things you can't do with a computer as of yet the artistry you as the client will come into a memorial dealer you'll have an idea in your head to them they convey it to the manufacturer the manufacturer then comes up with concept designs maybe models gives that to the memorial dealer gives that to you you look at it you make modifications and it's a dialogue that goes back and forth a computer can't do that you have to have an individual to intervene between your mind as the consumer and the artist that's in the granite plant but that doesn't mean that the computer can't do a lot of the work of producing the models and the finished piece here's an example of a piece that's being carved by that little tiny drill bit encrusted with diamonds but again someone's got to create that concept and so that's not going to disappear anytime soon that'll be there for a very long time to come but the artist is one that is constantly got to be taught how these new technologies can be incorporated in their work on a daily basis and right now the granite industry is looking more for these people the people that know how to interface with machines in order to instruct them how to do complex tasks you can have a big beautiful cutter like this but if you don't have the technician to be able to operate it effectively then you may not be producing anything of any value to the marketplace and so that's where the granite industry is today the granite worker is no longer an immigrant but the granite worker today is someone who's coming out of a technical program and has technical experience for the most part so if you want to take an interface with both the technicians and the artist I would suggest coming to the grand opening of the Vermont Granite Museum on May 5th and I just looked at my phone a few minutes ago and they're promising it's supposed to be okay weather not great it keeps it was good though yesterday it was like 62 and sunny and now it's like partly cloudy and 56 it's like who knows it's spring so on May 5th what we'll have is at least three sculptors on hand to talk to the people and this piece is going to be unveiled so this is a piece that Chris Miller created he is just starting this this is back in July of last year it is now finished and it'll become the sign for the museum out front and I'll give you a clue as to what it is it's titled Heritage so if you think about what's the history of the granite industry where does it begin so where did the story start and so Chris will be unveiling this along with the mayor of Barry and there'll also be other dignitaries that will present as well and we'll have six different sculpting stations throughout the museum and since working in granite takes months we'll let you work in clay, PVC pipe cardboard rigid foam and soft foam so easy things and we'll also have a few blocks of marble on hand which these guys talk about is carving butter but we'll let you see the pneumatic tools and just how easy it is to carve through a block of marble which is in terms of its dust so it makes it a little easier for us we don't have to cover you with all sorts of equipment but you will have your safety glasses, ear protection and work next to one of the vacuum systems which you can see behind Chris so that's sucking away the dust so are there any questions they're going to bring a mic to you besides granite ballast that's coming in from international sources, is there any other international sources that are competing with the US granite companies? Yes, definitely so today we've got granites that are coming from Brazil, India, China and South Africa and you can stop at the memorial dealer on Route 7 and you can see all the possible colors and today there are more granite quarries that are open globally than ever before to fuel not our interest in memorials but countertops so of course no one wants a countertop that is one color or just modeled in gray and white like berry gray is instead you want something that's really interesting, it's got all kinds of wacky designs in it, great streaks that's the stuff of interest and it hides all the stains and all the stuff you've left on the table but for the granite industry the biggest competitors are those that are able to produce products out of high quality granites from the global market but just the same you've got berry gray which is probably one of the best materials to use for sculpture, other materials are fine for sandblasting and carving letters and things of that nature are cutting blocks of different dimensions but if you're going to carve something in the round then you really want to work with something that's fine grain, consistent all the way through the material so you're not going to end up with what's called a white knot where there is no biotite or mica but instead it's got just a big quartz crystal in it it's like nope that doesn't look good so berry gray is one of those materials where you're always going to be pleased with the final product and another thing that you can find granite at a global level that you won't find in our berry gray is iron who wants to look at a monument that's streaked with rust nobody so you want to work with some material that has no iron or iron that is so low and is so locked up that it's never going to dissolve away and leave you those rust streaks or voids within the material would you be able to name a few monuments across the country that may be in Washington DC two that used berry so I just went to Washington DC two inches ago with the family and we went by Union Station Union Station is made out of Bethel white and the project started in 1910 1911 and just look up there's these massive statues up there of goddesses they're like 11, 13 feet tall and every one of them is made out of Bethel white granite so there's one and a lot of the other structures skyscrapers that are decorated on the inside and outside post offices the capitals of many of the cities throughout the northern part of the U.S Albany is one I think it's Minnesota their capital building and so they're made out of either Bethel white or berry gray or the three basic materials that you'll find scattered and I've got a good list running so it's one of those things that we're developing and eventually we'll be up on our website we've worked on it this winter I had heard that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is made out of berry granite is that true so are you talking about the one here in Vermont no, Washington DC Washington DC so that's made out of a black granite and that was polished in Vermont but the granite itself comes from I think Pennsylvania they polished and sandblasted all the elements in the state here so again can you imagine sandblasting those and making a mistake and you're like uh so obviously you want to find someone who's highly qualified to be able to do that kind of work but the mistakes are not allowed with that kind of work do you have any idea how many years worth of quarrying capacity remains in Vermont so we will never run out of granite within the state of Vermont what will happen is just what happened to marble we will transition from using one material to another so either our memorialization will be done in a different material or we'll stop memorializing in this way entirely it'll be holograms or something else if you think about the number of Americans today that are being cremated and we've got up to almost 70 something percent now of Americans are being cremated and how many of those are finding their way into the cemetery fewer and fewer years passed by those ashes are being spread on Lake Champlain on the top of Mount Mansfield and so and memorializing is done on the internet you can find permanent websites that are memorializing a loved one and so there you can put an infinite amount of information video clips, photographs, text whatever you wish as opposed to putting it in a cemetery which means you have to travel to it and see it because well this is covered on the internet instead so I haven't forgotten one of the materials which make up the figures inside the Lincoln Memorial and the Jefferson Memorial oh that's a good question I couldn't answer off top of my head I did actually see the Lincoln Memorial and I didn't pay much attention to it because I was so busy looking at the site you had a question oh in terms of a memorial that a war memorial that came from Vermont I thought it was I'm visualizing a row of soldiers so that's the Korean Memorial and that was sculpted by a Vermont that's right and Frank Gaylord did that at work and the people that are modeled for those are actually from Central Vermont and he just passed away recently and Frank like all of the other sculptors that worked in the granite industry they worked in other materials as well they work in marble and serpentine and often they would create models that would then be turned into bronzes they would also decorate like hardware for mausoleums and doors to commercial buildings that would be cast in bronze and so that was Frank's work quick question in Islaymont there's a deposit there that's world famous what is that stone up there? marble and all you need to do is go to the railroad station right here at the bottom of Main Street and you'll see Islaymont marble, Berry Gray you'll find also marble that comes from Dambi Mountain so it's a mix of all sorts of Vermont materials so it's a nice structure for, I remember geology class at UVM we went down there and took a look at it so it was a good stop and then we went to the quarry now I'm on what are the unique geological happenings which occurred which make all this material, these materials available in Vermont so it's not just one event it's multiple events that create you've got progenies so you've got mountain construction that's building the green mountains the hills further to the west the teconics and you've got first an ocean floor so in fact our marbles are older than some of the granites within the state and our granite belt much of that is a plume of granite or multiple plumes of granite that were well below the earth surface and it's through erosion that brought those up to the very top and made them accessible to us to use these raw materials so each one is a different phase and there's a really good roadside history, geology history of the state of Vermont and it's terrific because you can just pop it open and say I'm going to drive Route 7 and they'll tell you all those geological features along the way I'd recommend it it's a great way to see the state of Vermont through that text so thank you, thank you, thank you you're welcome