Authors: David B. Williams
Into the hole created by the removal of the key block, or more often key blocks, men took the next great power tool, the steam
drill.
They cut horizontal holes every six inches at the long base of an adjoining block, inserted more wedges, and pounded
the wedges with a hammer until the block separated from the rock below.
Hookers then attached dogs to the massive block, which
could be four feet wide by seven feet high by thirty or forty feet long, and pulled, or turned, it onto its side with ropes
attached to the derrick.
Another set of guys split the now horizontal block into smaller pieces with more holes, more wedges,
and more pounding.
Finally, hookers attached the block to the derrick and everyone hoped the block wouldn’t fall and crush
them.
About the last process that required humans actually working with cutting tools was scabbling.
Despite its success, Mr.
Tarbox’s
method was not perfect; many blocks broke off with projecting bumps, edges, and knobs.
The scabbler’s job was akin to a plastic
surgeon’s: Remove the offending irregularities and leave behind a smooth and beautiful face.
But scabblers’ days couldn’t
last forever, and by 1907 a machine utilizing disks with steel teeth had replaced the stone surgeons.
With the rise of the machines and the spread of the railroad, Salem Limestone was on its way to becoming America’s stone.
In 1877 twenty quarries produced 339,153 cubic feet of stone, roughly enough material to adorn one and a half Empire State
Buildings, the most famous Salem-covered structure.
By 1895 forty-eight quarries produced 5,368,307 cubic feet and by 1912
the number had risen to 10,442,304 cubic feet.
Sales peaked in 1928 at 14.4 million cubic feet, about 70 percent of all exterior
stone sold in the United States that year.
Although saying this in front of a quarryman might not be prudent, modern quarrying looks rather boring compared to that of
the past.
Or as one quarry owner put it, “We were a lot tougher back then.” Gone are the Eiffel Tower-esque derricks with
their head-cracking cables, body-skewering hooks, and bone-crushing dropped blocks.
No longer do coal-powered channelers pollute
the air with noxious fumes or ruin ears with incessant pounding.
And in the most up-to-date quarries, no one swings a hammer.
Technology has taken over the least technological building material in the world.
Quarries now look like a young boy’s dream with oversized dump trucks carrying blocks the size of an SUV and massive front-end
loaders cruising around the yards lifting, tipping, and stacking stone.
Front-end loaders have also allowed quarries to tidy
up because the machines can more easily move and stack blocks anywhere they need to be.
But the big rigs have created a new
hazard at quarries, the potential to be run over by a truck.
“It’s the law of gross tonnage.
Get out of their way,” said Jones
as we sat idling in his pickup waiting for a mountainous truck to pass.
Machines developed in the past few decades have further reduced the number of men working in the quarries.
At the ILCO quarries,
fewer than a dozen men worked on the stone.
On the lowest level of the quarry, one guy drove a truck, two guys operated front-end
loaders, and six guys worked on a recently turned block.
Fifteen feet above them two men walked around the quarrying surface,
which covered an area the size of a football field.
Running the length of this surface were rows of crisscrossed channels.
Several rows had been removed and the quarry resembled a half-eaten pan of limestone brownies.
In bygone times, a channeler would have made these cuts, but at this quarry, as at all other quarries in the Belt, a diamond
belt saw cut these lines.
It looks like a chain saw fashioned for Paul Bunyan, with a 16-foot-long blade extending out of
a white box the size of two telephone booths.
Instead of a steel cutting belt, the blade has a 11.2-inch-wide polyurethane
belt studded every 2 inches with raised metal plates.
Microscopic diamonds encrust the stubby,T-shaped plates, which feel
like sandpaper, gritty but not sharp.
As the belt spins, the plates can cut through 16 feet of limestone at 4 inches per minute.
These are the cuts that Todd Thompson and Brian Keith like because when the blocks are removed they leave behind a smooth
face.
“Yeah, it’s like kids in a candy factory when we get geologists in here,” said one quarry owner, when asked if he worked
with geologists.
The diamond belt saws require constant streams of water, which keeps the blade and belt cool while cutting.
At the quarries
water gushed out of the previously cut grooves and onto the quarry floor.
Water also keeps the dust down.
As with most quarries,
water use requires the Indiana quarries to operate only in above-freezing temperatures.
In addition to using specifically designed equipment, ILCO workers also borrow technology.
The two guys walking across the
quarry surface crisscrossed with channels were using a product originally developed for rescue workers: industrial air bags.
The workers took gray air bags, about 2 feet by 3 feet, and dropped them down into the 13.4-inch-wide channel closest to the
exposed, vertical face of the limestone.
Each bag was connected to an air compressor that slowly inflated the bags.
As the
bags grew, the men dropped additional bags into the widening gap, until the 130-ton block tipped over and onto a pile of rubble
on the quarry floor.
Quarrymen call this “turning a cut.”
Men then clamored onto the rock with hydraulic air drills.
Bringing Tarbox’s technique into modern times, they drilled three
twenty-inch-deep holes in a row and inserted a hydraulic expander, the arms of which spread and split the rock.
“Our goal
is to have no more guys swinging hammers,” said Jones.
“We are one of the few quarries to use these expanders.
They are faster
and safer and split the rock more cleanly.”
Other quarries still use hammers.
On a turned cut, men drill holes only six inches deep and six inches apart, insert plugs
and feathers, and hammer them into the rock.
Because the plug and feather technique creates short drill holes, the ends of
these blocks look like a grin of perfect teeth.
These quarries sound different than ILCO’s.
From a hundred yards away and
above the sound of trucks, air compressors, and saws, it sounded like a chain gang working on a railroad as metal pinged metal
when the men pounded the plugs.
The end product of both the hammer and the hydraulics is the block.
At nonworking quarries, they clutter the ground in haphazard
mounds, as if the children of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Dorchester Giant had wandered west and continued to play.
These blocks
are the abandoned dreams of earlier workers.
The stone may have had a flaw, such as fossils or a crack, or the quarry owners
ran out of money and left behind a mess they had planned to clean up.
Blocks also litter working quarries.
They may form protective borders around active quarry ledges or sit in long-forsaken
piles dotted with trees, but most spread across quarry yards in row upon orderly row.
Indiana Limestone regularly has over
twenty thousand blocks that cover an area one-third mile long by one-quarter mile wide.
In a further nod to technology, every block at the ILCO yard has a bar-coded label telling the cutting date, grade, and color.
Color is critical because the most valuable stone, buff, costs six dollars more per cubic foot than gray and twelve dollars
more than the least expensive, variegated, a combination of buff and gray.
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To access information on the blocks, ILCO installed a wireless network across the twenty-three-hundred-acre site, so the
workers could read the labels and transmit information back to the main office.
“The system has really helped except that
we had nonquarry people tapping into our network, so we had to give access codes to everyone on staff,” said Jones.
Blocks are the basic unit of the building industry.
Out of them will come the raw materials, such as panels, sills, and keystones,
to be assembled into courthouses, homes, and skyscrapers or, if an artist gets the stone, sculptures, monuments, and statues.
All the blocks need is someone to cut them open.
Cutting takes place away from the quarry at a mill, also known as the fabrication or cutting facility.
Here, too, diamonds
play an essential role.
No one, however, would court anyone with these diamonds.
They neither sparkle nor shine.
Nor are they
rare, and most can barely be seen except with magnification.
Cutting implements in use in the limestone industry contain diamonds
ranging in size from three hundred to a thousand microns, no thicker than the proverbial one thin dime.
Nor are these diamonds natural.
Industrial diamonds are made in labs that replicate the high-pressure (fifty thousand times
what we feel on Earth), high-temperature (twenty-two hundred degrees Fahrenheit) environment that forms natural diamonds.
First created in the 1950s, most industrial diamonds originally came from factories owned by General Electric and DeBeers.
Both companies still produce synthetic diamonds, but so do the former Soviet bloc countries, as well as China and India.
Although mills in the Belt utilize the same basic technology, they take very different approaches.
The ILCO mill is the most
advanced, with many computer-programmed machines.
It was eerily clean, as if the computers had taken over, with no cables,
wires, or trash visible in the large indoor facility.
Only a few workers were doing much physical labor.
One man sat complacently
at his computerized control panel.
He had only to watch and make sure nothing went wrong.
The machine slid the block forward,
lowered the guide bar, engaged the belt, and cut the block.
In contrast, at a much smaller mill, the guy sitting outside and
running the wire saw monitored it vigilantly.
He may have been motivated by the several men crowded around a nearby wire saw
that they had partially dismantled because it had started to miscut.
He did have one advantage over the indoor stone guy:
The noise produced by the stone screaming under the outside saw was not nearly as loud as at ILCO’s facility.
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The big limestone slabs next get cut with diamond-tipped circular saw blades.
The majority of limestone slabs end their trip
through the mill after a couple of passes through a circular saw, resulting in some sort of product—slab, step, cap, or quoin—with
squared edges.
Most jobs require a single blade, but to fashion multiple, same-sized blocks, such as for thin veneer or treads,
some slabs get ripped by gangs of up to twenty-two blades.
“Operating the diamond saw was the easiest job,” said Bob Thrasher, who worked in the mills in the 1950s.
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“I could do it by ear, just listening to the stone until it was done, and then moving the block.
I read the entire Bible,
Old and New Testament, working on the diamond saw.” Judging from the stacks of books, newspapers, and
New Yorker
s in his home, Thrasher appeared to have kept on reading, despite losing an eye in the mill, when a wire snapped and hit him
in the face.
“My father worked in the mills, too.
He quit one afternoon when he was loading a railroad flatcar with his boss
and the chock came out.
The car started moving and split his boss in two.
Dad never went back.”
Three common denominators stood out at the mills: Everyone was male and had on a hard hat and safety glasses.
Beyond these
similarities, they wore jeans, overalls, or shorts; earplugs or industrial ear mufflers; sneakers or steel-toed boots.
There
were wiry little guys and beer-bellied ones.
A few looked as if this was their first post-high-school job, whereas some of
the men looked old enough to have grandkids in high school.
But no women.
They were only in the offices.
No one came out overtly
and said they wouldn’t hire women, not that they would tell an outsider, but most questioned whether a woman could take the
physical requirements of the jobs, either in a mill or in a quarry.
The reliance on new technology hasn’t eliminated all the old tools.
Some milling occurs in a world little changed from the
industry’s glory days of the early 1900s.
It is a world that relies on steel to shape stone, a world full of dust.
(Fortunately
for the workers, limestone dust, which is made of the same material as a Tums tablet—calcium carbonate—is much less harmful
than granite dust, which leads to silicosis, a lung disease that killed many Quincy quarrymen.)
For big jobs, the millmen turn to the planer, which employs a custom-cut sheet of steel to slide back and forth along the
edge of a block and shave the stone.
With a handful of passes, the blade transforms a rectangle of stone to a graceful scrolled
molding.
Planing such as this stands in stark contrast to the way granite is cut, because no blade, no matter what the material,
could shave granite.
It is too hard.
But beneath the limestone, piles of shredded fossils accumulate, as if the rock is going
back in time and returning to its prelithification state.