Granite and the Quarry Coast

Stand on almost any island in Penobscot Bay and look down. The stone under your feet is likely pink or gray granite, some of the oldest exposed bedrock on the Eastern Seaboard, pushed to the surface by the same glacial forces that carved this coastline. For about a century, beginning in the eighteen thirties, that granite was among the most sought-after building material in the United States, and the islands and peninsulas of Penobscot Bay were the quarries that supplied it.

Vinalhaven Island, fourteen miles off the mainland, became one of the most productive granite-quarrying centers in the country. At its peak in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, Vinalhaven had more than two thousand residents, most of them connected to the quarrying industry. Workers came from Finland, Scotland, Sweden, and Ireland. The stone they cut was shipped by schooner to every major American city. The State Department Building in Washington used Vinalhaven granite, and so did the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. The paving blocks that once covered the streets of Boston and New York and Philadelphia came in large part from these islands.

The quarrying was done by hand and by controlled explosive charges. Workers drilled rows of holes in the rock face, inserted wedges and plugs, and split the granite along lines they had scored by eye. The process required skill that took years to learn. Quarry workers were among the more organized and politically active laborers in late-nineteenth-century Maine, their unions shaped by the Finnish immigrant community in particular, which brought with it a tradition of labor cooperative politics.

The granite industry declined after about nineteen ten, as cheaper concrete and manufactured facing materials began to replace cut stone in construction. Many of the quarry pits on Vinalhaven filled with water and became swimming holes. The equipment rusted. The imported population dispersed. But the buildings the quarries built are still standing in every city on the Eastern Seaboard, holding the weight of the twentieth century in Maine stone.