Vermont Magazine Summer 19 | Page 91

Two teams of horses pull a block of granite past Barre’s Congregational Church on Church Street. monument to Ethan Allen, a Vermont Revolutionary War hero and one of the founders of Vermont. That same year Ira received a contract to provide granite for the reconstruction of the Vermont State House, which had been gutted by fire. According to Arthur W. Brayley, in his History of the Granite Industry of New England (1913), the granite of Vermont’s State House “received a most trying test by the burning of the interior, but with the exception of a few window caps and other pieces exposed to the most intense heat, no part of the walls required to be replaced by new material.” The remarkable durability of Barre’s granite increased demand for the stone, requiring the development of addi- tional quarries. In the late 1840s, the railroads in Vermont not only helped in the expansion of Barre’s granite industry, but it also encouraged the opening of other commer- cial granite quarries across the state. The cheaper and easi- er transport of granite by rail allowed stoneworkers to take advantage of their local granite resources and to market them at competitive rates. In 1848 for example, the granite company Estey & McDonald established itself in Brattleboro just as rail lines connected Brattleboro to urban regions in southern New Eng- land. The number of small granite quarries and manufacturers increased throughout eastern Vermont as more railroads opened during the late nineteenth century. Public memorials became a new product line for Vermont’s growing granite industry at the close of the American Civil War (1865). Communities throughout the Northeast placed orders for com- memorative monuments (often called soldiers’ monuments), placing them on town greens and in other public places to honor those lost during the war. Seven soldiers’ monuments, using Vermont granite, were installed in Vermont between 1866 and 1876, including Derby (1866), Cornwall (1868), Rochester (1868), St. Johnsbury (1868), Peacham (1869), Williamstown (1869) and Cabot (1876). During the next 60 years, Vermont granite 89