We attended a tour of Fletcher Granite at their Chelmsford, MA quarry
and fabrication shop on Monday 05-10-04. We met an incredibly fine &
friendly group of people that included everyone that we came across in
the fabrication plant. I was told that a few of their employees had been
there for forty years. They are open to tours particularly of small
groups of 4-6, suggest that you call first.

I was with Victor Castellani, chairman who took on the day relaxed in
jeans. My first encounter with him after we got off the bus, I did not
yet know his role, was for me to meet and pet this three legged dog. A
nine-year old partner with a hind leg lost to bone cancer. I felt
homesick right at once.

While we stood above at the open-pit quarry, behind an old fence at one
edge, Victor described various details of what we saw. He researches
granite deposits, buys up and re-opens quarries where possible. It was
obvious from the bright glint in his eye and soft smile that he is in
love with granite.

A wire saw with ten strands of 7,000 lf of wire each that stretched
across the quarry and off into the distance behind a ridge. Plans to
convert operations to diamond wire. There were several small crews of on
average 4 to 6 quarriers that worked at different locations throughout
the quarry. On old and recently unworked faces there were vertical
streaks of an oxide stain run down the sheer vertical of the stone,
possibly from iron deposits, but more likely from ferrous wedges, fence
posts or other anchors left behind in decades past. Whereas in histo
presto we tend to be 100 years after market and we worry about iron
stain of stone, in the quarry it does not appear to be important or even
thought about.

At one place there were circular cuts in the quarry floor about 4' in
diameter that resembled very large core drills. The cores, when we
entered the quarry site, we could see lain out on their sides in the
stone yard. All of the newly quarried, and not yet fabricated stones in
the yard, some of them quite large, had a barcode tag glued to them with
construction adhesive -- the type you can buy at Home Depot and comes in
a cartridge. I asked how long it had taken them to develop tags that did
not fall off, but they did not understand my interest in their inventory
process.

Vertical wall channel equipment were set in place in the quarry and
operational to cut two grooves; on either side of a massive block 90'
high, 90' wide and 70' deep. The grooves themselves were 10' wide.
Cranes set up with suspended work scaffolds. A great deal of compressed
air technology combined with water. Water blast equipment, a recently
developed technology had replaced flame cutting, a very loud and
wasteful process.

I was told how their diesel switch locomotive unattended had lost
hydraulics a few weeks prior and run free down the hill and across the
local road before it settled to a stop -- and so they apologized that
they thought it a good idea to discontinue taking public tours through
the quarry.
I pointed across at what looked like an old face and asked Victor when
that would have been from and he said the 50's. He then apologized for
how small the quarry hole was. We got into a conversation re: the
relative larger size of aggregate to dimension stone quarries. There are
quarries that primarily produce granite aggregate for concrete work.
 They tend to supply to a 20 mile radius being dependent on truck transport.

Victor emphasized the need for the quarry industry to get away from
houses and people and suburbs. Fletcher Granite recently purchased 600
acres at the very top of Maine at $200 per acre in order to quarry 20
acres of the site. It is also obvious that there is a need for quarries
to hold on where they are established. At Chelmsford they quarry 24
hours, including, I gather, in winter. At their other quarries they
harvest when their fabrication yard inventory is low, or when there is a
particular demand for the stone. A typical size of crew for a satellite
quarry, working with portable equipment, is four.

During the stone symposium at MIT the Fletcher group showed a few slides
with expanding grout poured into drill holes used to split out large
sections of granite from the quarry. I asked if we could get a design
mix as I had some repointing work to do. Later someone in the audience
did make a point to track me down and tell me that I should not repoint
with explosive mortar. My line changed to being able to offer right up
front to customers that we could assure them of ruining their building
without a doubt, unlike with the "hard" mortar devotees who were not
quite as confident in their destructive results. Honestly, though, I
would like to play a bit with cutting stone with expanding mortars... a
desire not too removed from wanting to play with pyrotechnics and black
powder.

Throughout the technical presentations, and the quarry tour, there were
references re: rift lines, the invisible alignment of crystals that
makes a split stone in one direction relatively easy, whereas the
perpendicular is know in the trade as "the hard way." The subject of
rift lines, combined with the art of grazing, or the finding of large
boulders that lay about exposed on the ground that can then be cut up
caused me to ask if there is any interest in the revival of the ancient
trade practice of dousing for stone. This seemed to be a fairly large
speed bump to the speakers as I got the impression they had not
considered the mythic properties of stone as a technical issue, and this
was a technical symposium. Luc Mannolini, PhD of Vermont Quarries asked
me my name, to which I replied Gabriel Orgrease. He tried his best to
answer, as I had also thrown in a misunderstanding on my part of his
presentation on cave quarry practice for marble harvesting that had to
do with their drilling several, if not very very many, exploratory cores
prior connected in with capitalization of new mining equipment. Jan
Anders Brunden of Sweden got it and responded that to seek stone was
like attending a Klondike Gold Rush and hoping for the best.

Technical issues: I heard at the symposium a most incredibly lucid and
clear explanation of the dynamic of salts in crystallization that expand
and break pore structure in stone from Professor George W. Scherer of
Princeton University. It was fascinating and since you may not have been
there I will not repeat it.

I also met at lunch Neil Craig McClelland, a professed friend and past
associate of our own David West. He told me about finding sea shells
scattered between the rafters, above the ceiling, of the Hampton Court
Palace and that though nobody had any clear idea beyond a speculation of
"insulation" as to why the shells were there that during restorations
they were carefully replaced. Neil was fairly bold in his presentation
providing a case study in the failures associated with a stone project.
[Ken Uracius of Grand Masonry -- a fellow BP'r, sponsored the lunch on
Sunday. There is a rumor of plans stewing for an histo presto gathering
at Newport, RI.]

For those curious, I also had dinner with Nick Micros who has been in
the US at work at Mount Albans cemetery. He hopes to get back home to
Switzerland with his family next Sunday.

Steven Haynes of the Marine Granite Industry Historical Society Museum
provided a display of no longer available granites that he as a lapidary
had tracked down and made samples of, maps of the Maine granite
industry, a diorama of a granite quarry, and an assortment of granite
quarrier's tools. Talk of tools, Randy Potter of Trow & Holden seemed to
have been divested of all of his tools, slides and presentation
materials by the hotel and was forced to give a talk that despite his
not having any props was very clear. I admire anyone that if left with
no devices on a street corner would be able to teach and convey useful,
and humorous, information. Any chance I get I plan to visit Trow & Holden.

One of the most incredible things I have seen in a long time was the
fellow at the Fletcher fabrication shop who operated the circumferential
splitter. This machine is an adjustable hydraulic guillotine that splits
stone on a curve for street curbing. By then my camera had maxed out...
but the operator, a thin and wiry fellow, was like a spider man playing
with the hydraulic levers of his machine. With the American flag coated
with stone dust, the flowery paper picture of Christ on the Cross taped
to a face of the machine, the precise and rhythmic jump, twist and
dance, the worn out seat hammered together of wood, I got a sense that I
had come upon a shrine.

At the fabrication shop Victor told us we could have all the stone we
could carry. I walked away with a nice chunk that I had to move with me
through the Boston subway system.

The stone symposium was in great measure arranged by Susan Schur, Ivan
Myjer, Bill Barlow and Henry Moss. There were a number of PTN attendees,
APT members, and friends from Quinque. There were a good number of
people, friends met, and connections made and not all of them have been
reported above. I have been informed that next time I am to arrive with
a dowsing wand.


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