The resurgence in interest in Indiana limestone means that about 800 persons now are employed in the industry, perhaps double the number of 10 years ago. That is good news for an area of Indiana not exactly brimming with economic bounty. But it is a far cry from limestone`s heyday late in the last century and earlier in this century, when the mills and quarries employed more than 10,000 men.
Limestone was king in those days. It was an era when the U.S. was brashly trumpeting its newfound economic dominance in the world. Every American city worthy of the name heralded its own greatness with soaring new business districts filled with buildings designed in the revivalist mode-Greek, Roman, Georgian or whatever suggested power, magnificence and a link to the glories of the past. The styles dictated that the buildings be made out of stone, and several railroads built lines into Bloomington and Bedford, the twin centers of the limestone industry, to supply it.
The trains hauled out thousands of carloads of stone every year, bound for New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami and all points in between. Indiana limestone clad the highest, most handsome buildings in every major American city. It was the stuff with which much of Washington, D.C.`s federal complex and many state capital and regional post office buildings were made. It found its way to more than 200 county seats, used to construct courthouses, giving rural Americans in the remotest corners of the land a taste of stately grandeur. And rare is the major American university or college campus that is without at least one, classic limestone building.
What made Indiana limestone so popular is precisely what makes it popular now. The deposits are found mainly in Indiana`s Monroe and Lawrence counties, the remnants of sandbars formed about 330 million years ago when the Midwest was a vast, shallow, tropical sea. The limestone is a sort of hardened, primordial cake of shell fragments and microfossils crushed endlessly by tide and wave action, much like the white sands forming now off the Bahamas and the Florida coast.
The Indiana deposits run anywhere from 30 to 90 feet deep. The deposits are unusual in that they yield up so much stone devoid of geological imperfections. Quarriers often can go through the full, 90-foot depth of a deposit, recovering stone from the bottom that has the same color and consistency as the top. That is important to architects who want to clad a skyscraper in stone but want an absolute continuity of color and texture from bottom to top.
Moreover, Indiana limestone has a grainless quality, meaning that it will split in any direction. This quality, combined with its relative softness compared to granite or marble, makes it easy to cut and shape into an infinite number of architectural forms and detail without fear of its being ruined by splitting and crumbling.
Those qualities did not go unnoticed when the earliest European settlers, farming families of English, Scots and Irish stock, began coming into the region 200 years ago. The eastern end of the deposit sometimes pops to the Earth`s surface in the Bloomington-Bedford environs. But, after millions of years of geologic shifts, it slants gradually 200 miles westward, ending deep beneath the rich farmlands of western Illinois.
The early settlers of the region discovered the stone popping out of streambeds. They chipped what they could from the deposits, using it for foundations, fireplace hearths and chimneys in their log cabins. The first commercial quarry opened north of Bloomington in 1827 but closed two years later because the local market was so limited and lack of transport made it impossible to sell elsewhere.
Early in the 1850s, however, the first of the railroad lines then beginning to spread their spidery webs across the nation reached the Bloomington area. The railroaders needed abutments to anchor their bridges across rivers and streams, and they soon found that limestone suited that purpose admirably and abundantly. By 1854 quarrying was a going business in the area. Within a few years, limestone blocks were being transported by rail to urban centers as a construction material, as well.
English quarriers had centuries of experience in digging up and shaping limestone into castles, churches and urban buildings from deposits in the British Isles. When they heard about the gigantic deposits in Indiana so similar in quality to their own, many of them came to investigate and stayed to invest. One, David Reed, arrived in 1871 and opened a quarry with a partner, forming Tomlinson and Reed. That same year, the Great Chicago Fire forever changed the fortunes of the Indiana quarries.
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When the embers of the October fire had burned down, Chicagoans noticed among the ruins that stone buildings survived better than others and Indiana limestone buildings survived particularly well. The first large building scheduled to go up in the city`s reconstruction was a new city hall. The architects selected Indiana limestone as the building material, and Tomlinson and Reed won the contract to supply the stone.
The magnificence of the new city hall was all the advertising the Indiana limestone industry needed. The greatest architects of the age were assembled in Chicago, and the city became a living laboratory for architectural experimentation and innovation. Indiana limestone was most often the material of choice for the architects. When builders in other metropolitan centers saw what was being done in Chicago, limestone buildings began springing up elsewhere, first in the Midwest, then throughout the country.
The demand was so great for stone that the quarry and mill operators had to go back to the Old World to fill their burgeoning workforces with experienced quarrymen, cutters and carvers from European quarries and mills. Thus Lawrence and Monroe counties quickly became a sort of polyglot of nationalities, with stone men emigrating from England, Scotland, Germany, France and Italy.
Except for during World War I, the growing demand for Indiana limestone never really stopped from 1871 until 1929, the start of the Great Depression. The two counties now are pocked with gaping monuments to limestone`s heyday. Hundreds of abandoned quarries have lain idle for half a century or more, bristling with rusting hulks of old derricks, choked with encroaching undergrowth, slowly filling with spring and rainwater. Each site is littered with grout piles-small mountains of massive stone blocks deemed unusable by long-ago quarrymen because of one imperfection or another.
The Empire Hole is one such place. It is a darkly primeval chasm that plunges suddenly from the perimeter of Hopkins cemetery on the outskirts of Needmore, a sleepy little hamlet north of Bedford. Empire Hole got its name in the 1920s when it yielded the stone that encases New York`s City`s Empire State Building.
The hole is enormous, hundreds of feet long and narrow, with sheer walls dropping 90 feet to clear, deep, greenish spring-fed waters that fill the pit`s bottom. On a hot summer`s day local teenagers trespass into the Empire Hole, as they do at dozens of other abandoned quarries in the area, leaping into cooling depths of the quarry water. The walls of the old quarry reverberate with youthful cries of exuberance and of shouted taunts as the swimmers dare each other to ascend higher and higher along the narrow ledges that are inscribed on the quarry wall. The most timid leap 15 feet into the water, the braver jump 30 or 40 feet, the most foolhardy take off from the very top of the wall.
It is all very illegal because of the obvious danger. A summer rarely passes when a trespassing swimmer doesn`t die in an abandoned quarry, either by drowning or by a fatal fall into the rocks. Illegal or not, the swimmers` antics invest the abandoned holes with an atmosphere of the incipient danger and exhilaration that must have been present when they were actively quarried long ago.
Quarrying is a brutish business requiring muscular men and brawny machines. Since the first quarries opened right through to today, the men in the quarries have had to work with extreme care as they have sawed, hacked and chiseled chunks of stone weighing hundreds of tons each out of the ground. Inattention to the placement and activity of other men and machines has put many a quarrier into the Hopkins cemetery and other area graveyards.
But to see a quarry at work, to see the brute strength of men and machines carving monolithic chunks of rock out of the bowels of the earth, is to perhaps glimpse through the mysteries of the labor of Egyptian and Incan pyramid builders. It is an activity rife with the symbolism of man slicing civilization out of earthly elements. The romance of the quarries certainly hasn`t been lost on the Bedford-Bloomington area, which still proudly proclaims itself ”Stone Country,” though few of the 100,000 people in the area still have any connection with the stone business.
It is unlikely that the limestone industry will ever become the dominant economic force it once was in the area. Labor-saving technology introduced gradually into the quarries over the last 20 years has drastically cut manpower needs for the stone industry.
And, due to the mercurial nature of the limestone business, since World War II, Stone Country has sought out a mix of industries to diversify the area economy. The area`s economy is now more prosaically dominated by medical equipment, appliance and elevator manufacturers, and Bloomington itself has long enjoyed the presence of Indiana University as its major employer.
Despite the resurgence of the limestone business, the courthouse square in Bedford, the Lawrence County seat, has for years had the look of a hard-luck town. The grand, limestone courthouse itself and the well-maintained, elegant limestone facades of a couple of banks on the square notwithstanding, it is a town literally crumbling from neglect. Most stores and buildings on the square, graceful limestone Victorian structures more than a hundred years old, give the place more of a European ambience than Midwestern, small-town America. A good number of them are vacant and derelict, including a dowager hotel that once would have done London, Paris or New York proud.
”I`d give anything to get into a time machine and go back to the turn of the century and see this town,” says Bill McDonald, the executive director
Certainly nepotistic by nature, the stone companies seem out of place in an era of mega-corporations, mergers and takeovers. Even now, while times are good, the quarry and mill companies expand cautiously, keeping themselves lean and small enough to contract when times are bad. That is perhaps not so surprising, considering most proprietors of limestone businesses started learning how to be the boss by watching their grandfathers running the business. And the men they employ could well be the grandsons of the early quarry workers.
”Look down there,” says Edward M. ”Ted” Reed, 64, the white-haired patrician and owner of Reed Quarries Inc. ”That`s a father-son team. The father`s in his 50s and has worked for us forever. His son`s in his early 20s.”
Reed is pointing to two men standing astride a freshly cut, 150-ton limestone slab at the bottom of the Reed quarry outside Bloomington. The two men are ”breakers,” pounding wedges into the slab, a 150-ton chunk of tropical sandbar that has been re-exposed to sunlight for the first time in 330 million years. The two, the quarry version of diamond cutters, have the crucial job of using pickaxes to slam lines of wedges into the slab until it begins to crack. They then delicately tamp the wedges until the slab splits off completely into 10- to 15-ton blocks suitable for shipment.
Two hookers, men with drills, climb onto the block once the breakers are done with it and drill slots, called dog holes, on either end of the block. They insert crane hooks into the dog holes so that the block can be lifted out of the quarry to dry.
”There`s a certain sort of man who likes to work outside,” Reed says of the men he hires to be quarriers. ”I like to hire a country-raised boy who`s worked with his dad splitting wood. Education isn`t so important as somebody who knows how to use a tool and likes to be around machines.” He says he pays them about $10 an hour, $17 counting benefits, competitive for the area. He is a descendant of David Reed, the man whose quarry supplied limestone for the rebuilding of Chicago City Hall in 1871. David Reed in 1900 encouraged a nephew to emigrate from England to get in the quarry business. The nephew, Sam Reed, came from Chester, England, and invested $100,000 in part-ownership of a quarry that had opened in 1890. Sam`s son, George, stayed with the business, and, in 1969, he and his son, Ted, the present owner, took over sole possession of the quarry.
”We`ve got a 90-acre quarry that`s been operating since 1890, and we`ve only mined about half of it out,” says Ted Reed, whose son, Steve, 42, works alongside him overseeing the operation every day. ”Quarrying the way we do today, we can take out about a half an acre a year. I reckon that`ll leave plenty enough stone to keep Steve going here until he retires, and enough for the lifetime of his boy (5-year-old Steve Jr.), too, if he wants to continue in the business.”
The Reed Quarry is a somewhat deceptive operation with its deep, sheer, manmade escarpments, cranes, derricks, oversized saws, gargantuan forklifts, towering grout piles and beehive activity. It has the look of Big Business on the order of a Minnesota iron-ore strip mine. It is in reality just a small business, employing a mere 20 workers during the March-to-November mining season and 10 workers in the winter months.
Reed`s is an average-size quarry operation, and his overall business is a bit smaller than most because his is one of the two quarries in the area that doesn`t also run a cutting mill. The Edgeworth Brothers, John, 64, and Terry, 58, run a more typical operation. They have a quarry and mill south of Bloomington, employing 50 men.