In 1872 a farmer from Guilford County bought a large parcel of land just east of Mount Airy. Surry County was growing rapidly with agricultural and business concerns lining up along important transportation routes to northern and western markets. John Gilmore (or, as the name is more commonly used here, Gilmer) was just one of many Greensboro residents looking to take advantage of the opportunities available in the area.
He was focused on the soil, however, not the potential of the rock beneath it.
When he discovered 40 acres of bare granite in the middle of the parcel he demanded the selling price be lowered to reflect the “worthless land.”
When Thomas Woodruff came to Mount Airy with the Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley Railroad a decade later, he focused on the granite.
His job was to find the best locations for the tracks and depots and to help source the materials to build each. When he was shown the “Flat Rock,” as locals called it, he recognized its value as building material and bought the land himself for $5,000.
Geologists and architects call it Mount Airy White and prize it for its flawless beauty. It formed millions of years ago when the North American and the African tectonic plates collided trapping a bed of magma between them.
As it cooled the minerals formed a single piece of white rock seven miles long and a mile and half wide that is heavily flecked with quartz and speckled with dark mica bits creating a sparkling, uniformly light gray finished product unlike any other deposit in the world. Pieces harvested from the quarry today look exactly like those quarried in 1889 when operations began. It has no seams, fractures, or composition change from one end to the other.
J. D. Sargent was recruited from a Vermont granite quarry in 1910. Quarry superintendent to start, he moved the company to produce more finished products and eventually began his own cutting and finishing business on the site. He finally bought Woodruff out completely. Sargent was followed by John Prather Frank who started as an assistant payroll clerk at the quarry just out of Duke University and the Army. He rose through the ranks until elected president of the North Carolina Granite Corporation (NCGC) in 1945.
NCGC has always owned the deposit but other companies such as the JD Sargent Granite Company, The North State Granite Company, and the Mount Airy Granite Cutting Company have mined and worked the granite through the years.
The quarry has produced everything from architectural blocks to street curbs, to gravel to grit for chicken feed. Nothing has gone to waste.
It became one of the largest employers in the county, including highly skilled jobs that attracted a great many immigrants from mining areas of Italy, Scotland, and England.
The list of monuments, buildings, and public works that used Mount Airy White is impressive: countless churches including Mount Airy’s Main Street churches, Friends Meeting House, Presbyterian, Trinity Episcopal, First Baptist, Holy Angels Catholic, and Grace Moravian; the Flat Rock Youth Center, 1950; the Surry County Courthouse; the state Legislative Building, and Law and Justice Building in Raleigh; the Guilford County Courthouse, Greensboro; the Arlington Memorial Bridge, Washington, D.C.; and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on the Hudson in New York City which used several tens of thousands of tons of granite.
The NCGC announced new owners based on Quebec, Canada at the beginning of the month. It will be exciting to see what they have in store for the ancient rock. We wish them well and hope to see Mount Airy White glittering in new and equally beautiful sites.
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com
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