Meditations at the Power Plant (4) - TRANSPORTATION

Standing today at the site of the Power Plant one can't help wondering how they did it, and where did all that stone go?

Granite quarrying reached industrial levels in the Age of Sail, primarily at coastal locations capable of shipping its enormous weight and bulk to markets. Much of the necessary mechanics had to do with getting the stone to the waterfront and aboard vessels.

The Babson Farm Quarry, Halibut Point 1909
Power Plant at center
Robert Phelps photo, courtesy of Cape Ann Museum

Splitting stone with pneumatic drills
Detail of photo above

The Power Plant's boilers converted fuel, probably coal, into useful energy for the lifting derricks and working tools employed in the quarry. The energy was distributed by pipes and hoses as compressed air. Previous technologies that directed steam from the boilers to the work stations utilized a much more hazardous medium.

Granite blocks carted to Folly Cove pier
Photo courtesy of Sandy Bay Historical Society

In the early stages of development at Halibut Point, finished blocks were transported to the waterfront by ox-drawn carts.

Locomotive "Nella" at the Folly Cove pier
Charles Cleaves photo 1909, Sandy Bay Historical Society

As the enterprise developed greater contracts and capitalization it invested in a rail line to ferry stone around the quarry site and down to the wharf at Folly Cove. By the late nineteenth century everything was owned by the Rockport Granite Company.

Granite Street at Folly Cove:
electric trolley tracks (l), railroad trestle (r), and piles of paving stones
Charles Cleaves photo, 1915 Sandy Bay Historical Society

The locomotive was brought to Halibut Point on trolley tracks from the Rockport railroad station.

Note the paving stones stacked at the intersection beside the pier. These probably came from smaller-scaled manual operations in the neighborhood to be shipped from the pier.

Pavers on Broad Street, New York, 1919
Sandy Bay Historical Society photo

Paving stones had been a backbone of the Cape Ann granite industry, but the twentieth century revolution in transportation rendered them obsolete. Automobile owners valued smooth surfaces over the jointed roadways that had given better traction to horse-drawn vehicles. The above photograph of pavers at work was taken at the time of transition to the era of rubber-tired cars like the one seen at right.

Unloading stone for the breakwater at Folly Cove
Photo from the Nickerson Collection
John and Betty Erkkila, Souvenirs of Pigeon Cove, 2014

Some of the quarry rubble was economical and useful in marine construction. Their irregular angular shapes locked together for structural strength and wave resistance. Granite sloops handled them with a loading boom footed to the mast while the sailing boom was held aside.

Placing capstones on the Sandy Bay Breakwater
Sandy Bay Historical Society photo

Large pieces of quarry rubble formed the bulk of the foundation for the Sandy Bay Breakwater. Many local companies contributed to it, glad to earn the $1.15 per ton being paid by the federal government in 1894 for detritus transported off their premises to the offshore dumping area.* The Breakwater was capped by carefully fitted stone from Halibut Point's Babson Farms Quarry whose geologic features and fissuring facilitated the production of massive rectangular blocks.

This ambitious public works project was begun in 1879 to develop a national harbor of refuge for coastal sailors and naval vessels at a time when storms and shipwrecks made maritime life perilous. The deep water within Sandy Bay, the good anchoring ground and, above all, the lack of a large harbor between Portland and Boston brought favorable attention to the location off Rockport.

The course, as laid out, provided for a V-shaped wall extending one mile north west by west toward Andrews Point, where a northern passage is left two thousand feet wide. Southerly, the breakwater extends a little less than three quarters of a mile to Avery's Ledge. Here is a southeastern entrance measuring one thousand five hundred feet. The harbor thus enclosed is of more than one thousand six hundred acres, with a depth of sixty feet of water and excellent holding ground.*

Granite sloop Albert Baldwin and the North Atlantic squadron, 1905
Library of Congress photo

The fortunes of the Babson Farm Quarry waxed and waned with the level of government construction appropriations authorized sporadically over the next three and a half decades. The fiscal priorities of World War I brought a final termination to the project.

Even more profoundly, maritime craft in this period were transitioning from the Age of Sail to the Age of Steam. The emerging engine-powered boats were less vulnerable to storms and more able to get to port in heavy weather. The highliner granite sloop Albert Baldwin, pictured above saluting the North Atlantic squadron in 1905 at Sandy Bay, was soon to be outmoded by new technologies.

A powerful series of transportation innovations enabled the granite industry at Halibut Point. Succeeding series ultimately left the quarry behind.

 

* Herman Babson, "The Building of a Breakwater", New England Magazine, October 1894.