Granite Quarrying Characters

The Cape Ann granite industry produced many one-of-a-kind granite quarrying characters. The Cape Ann Museum puts out a monthly publication for children called Timeship that features biographical material on Cape Ann residents from all periods of history. Here are some highlights from our archives on these hard-working and hard-living men.

Knowlton Knew

In 1823, Nehemiah Knowlton used a wedge and chisel to cut 500 tons of granite from boulders in the backyard of the old Lurvey house in Pigeon Cove [Rockport]. He advertised the stone for sale in a Boston newspaper, and that marked the beginning of the quarrying business in Rockport.

William Torrey saw the advertisement and went to Sandy Bay to check it out. He had been quarrying granite in Quincy, Massachusetts and knew that there was money to be made. Torrey soon set up his own quarrying business in Rockport, and he supplied nearly all of the granite for the Charlestown and Portsmouth Navy yards. At the height of his business, Torrey kept at least six stone sloops in constant use.

She Sailed Under Water

William Poland helped design the stone sloop Albert Baldwin at the James and Tarr yard in Essex in 1890. Because the sloop was made to carry stone, she was built with heavy three-inch planking and a reinforced deck.

But unlike the other stone sloops which carried granite along the coast, she had the daring Captain William Poland at the helm. Bill Daggett of Gloucester, who had sailed on the Albert Baldwin with Captain Poland, noted many years later that “…water never meant much. We’d sail through the water, under it and then over it.” It was said that Captain Poland gauged the vessel’s speed by the rush of water around his rubber boots.

Weather never meant much either. In her book Hammers on Stone, quarry historian Barbara Erkkila writes:

The six-foot Poland, whose strongest language was Gosh, darn it! was the only man who dared to sail her through a yellow-tailed sou’wester with the decks awash and a full cargo of stone down below.

Sometimes Poland brought his son along to do the cooking. He ordered him to “keep the coffee hot and make gingerbread.” Aware of his father’s reputation for daring, the worried boy asked what if something goes wrong? Poland answered; “See that porthole over there? You throw it out and make a new batch!”

Look Out Below

When Edwin Canney bought the Lanesville [Gloucester] Granite Company in 1899, wagons pulled by oxen hauled the granite out of his pit. The oxen moved so slowly that their owner, Blanchard Mitchell, had to run back and forth, urging them to speed up. Some people said that Mitchell ran 10 miles for each mile the oxen traveled.

Canney decided to get things moving a little faster. He built an inclined railway that stretched from the quarry…to his new pier where sloops and schooners could tie up to be loaded with granite.

Some people thought the granite might just move too fast on Canney’s railway. Many skeptics actually thought the railway cars would overshoot the end of the track and flip into Ipswich Bay. So when the railway was put into operation in 1901, a large group of concerned citizens including the mayor of Gloucester came to watch. The first rail car to come down carried a six-ton stone and moved at full speed. When the operator got his signal, he braked the car and tipped his cargo at the pier. The railway worked so well that by 1908 Canney had blasted a 65-foot deep hole that measured 500 feet by 400 feet.

Five Men in a Bowl

Stonecutter August Olson of Pigeon Cove called it the most “ticklish” job he had ever done when he worked for the Rockport Granite Company: it was the cutting of two 13-foot diameter granite fountains for the plaza at Union Station in Washington, D.C. The bowls were so big that five men could stand inside, shoulder to shoulder.

The stone bowls were made of sea green granite from the Blood Ledge quarry in Bay View [Gloucester]. The first block cut for the bowls weighed about 60 tons. Olson and the other stonecutters had to hammer it down to 40 tons before it could be lifted from the quarry.

As soon as the blocks had been turned into bowls, the locomotive Polyphemus pulled them down to the wharf. …The next challenge was transporting the bowls to their final destination. They wouldn’t fit through the doors of a regular freight car, and a flat car couldn’t be used because the bowls might tip over. The Rockport Granite Company had to borrow a flat car with crosspieces from the marble quarries in Vermont. The crosspieces held the bowls safely, and they were placed carefully in the plaza at Union Station where they can still be seen today.