The Granite Lady That Isn't Granite

Everyone calls the building up ahead the Granite Lady, and almost nobody calling it that stops to notice it is not actually granite. Completed in eighteen seventy four, the Old United States Mint is built mostly of sandstone shipped down from Newcastle Island in British Columbia, with granite used only for the foundation. The nickname stuck anyway, maybe because the building looked the part: a heavy, fortress like structure designed from the start to be nearly impossible to rob, its foundation poured specifically to defeat anyone who tried tunneling in from below.

It earned that defensive design. At the time of the great earthquake and fire of nineteen oh six, this mint was holding roughly three hundred million dollars in gold, by some estimates close to a third of the entire nation's gold reserve, sitting in vaults a few floors below street level while fire swept through the surrounding blocks. The heat outside got hot enough to melt the building's plate glass windows. What saved it was a well in the mint's central courtyard: the superintendent and his staff kept drawing water from that well and fighting the flames by hand while the city burned around them, refusing to let the fire reach the vaults. They won. The gold survived untouched, and in the days after the disaster, this building was one of the only functioning structures left standing in the entire burned district, which is the main reason it still carries its nickname with pride, granite or not. Leach himself later wrote about those days, and historians still credit his staff's refusal to abandon their posts as the reason the nation's currency stayed backed by real gold instead of ash.