Westerly and the Stone That Built the Nation

Just across the Rhode Island border, the town of Westerly sits on one of the great geological accidents of New England: a seam of fine-grained granite so hard and so pure in color that it became the stone of record for a nation building its monuments.

Westerly was founded in sixteen sixty-nine along the Pawcatuck River. For its first two centuries it was a modest farming and fishing community, its borders disputed by Rhode Island and Connecticut until seventeen twenty. Everything changed in eighteen forty-six, when a stone mason named Orlando Smith stumbled across a granite outcropping on a local hillside. He bought the land, opened a quarry, and started an industry that would define the town for the next hundred years.

Westerly granite came in two forms: Westerly Blue and Westerly White, both famed for their hardness and their ability to hold a fine carved edge. Those qualities made it the preferred stone for Civil War memorials. The Smith Granite Company alone produced at least fifty-seven monuments at Gettysburg Battlefield. When you add Antietam, Chickamauga, and the hundreds of town squares across the country, Westerly granite was physically present at nearly every solemn act of remembrance the nation conducted in the decades after eighteen sixty-five.

The industry pulled in workers from across the Atlantic. In the decades that followed, stonecutters arrived from Italy, many of them from Calabria and Sicily. By the nineteen hundred census, more than half of Westerly's residents were directly tied to the granite trade. Today more than thirty percent of the town identifies Italian-American ancestry, a lineage that runs straight back to those quarry hillsides.

The pits have since gone quiet, but the legacy stands in stone across thirty-two states.