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
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