HARDWICK – In June of 1888, the editor of the St. Johnsbury Caledonian wrote and published an article about the emerging granite industry in Hardwick which claimed that “granite has been mined in Hardwick as long ago as when the old stage coach used to run from Warner’s tavern on Hardwick Street to Montpelier,” but he gave no dates. We can probably assume he meant the antiquity of the pre-Civil War era. He claimed that the quarriers cut up only boulders (they stood above the ground and did not require the quarryman to remove soil or vegetation to get at the stone) and sent their product to Lamoille County for use as foundation stone.
H.R. Mack opened a granite and marble business in Mackville in 1868, the year Hardwick voters approved a $60,000 bond to support a mainline railroad through Hardwick. In 1888, his was “the oldest and most extensively worked quarry” in Hardwick. However, a lack of “capital and push,” the article claimed, kept the industry from growing as it might have.
About 1885 investors from outside Hardwick began to invest in the area’s granite industry of the area. As the local granite business expanded, two things became clear: Robinson or Robeson Mountain in Woodbury had an apparently inexhaustible supply of high-quality granite, and getting the stone off the mountain would require a railroad from the quarry site to the mainline railroad in Hardwick. Again, the lack of capital proved the problem, this time to fund the railroad.
Over the following few years, ambitious businessmen in Lamoille and Caledonia counties schemed about how to build their own railroad. In 1892, they convinced the Boston and Maine, which owned the main line, to run a 1.7 mile spur from the western edge of the village to the base of Buffalo Mountain.
The B&M spur didn’t go far enough, so in the spring of 1895, the railroad enthusiasts, despite the fact that they didn’t have enough money, formed a company and started work on creating the Hardwick and Woodbury Railroad to run the six or seven miles from the spur to the quarries. They hoped the town would buy another round of railroad bonds, but in September, 1895, at the third special town meeting on the question, the town refused.
Meanwhile, a group of leaders in the Village of Hardwick, an incorporated entity within the Town of Hardwick, lobbied the village to string electric lights to light the streets at night. In 1895, the village voters approved a contract with a Montpelier company to do the work. It turned the lights on in November, but in February 1896 it shut them off after a dispute with the village board of trustees. Those three months of lights had got the villagers’ attention, and at the village meeting in April, 1896, they instructed the Trustees to investigate the creation of an electric light plant.
The Woodbury Granite Company, c. 1912, in the foreground. Only the upper shed of the two on the left still stands.
Enter John S. Holden of the prosperous Holden and Leonard textile mills in Bennington. Holden had good financial backing, and he recognized a good opportunity when he saw it. He bought the Woodbury Granite Company with its apparently inexhaustible supply of stone, and he bought controlling interest in the H&W RR. With his backing, it opened for business in March 1897.
In 1897 Holden and his partners made plans to start cutting large monuments and mausoleums, but they postponed the decision of where to build the company’s main offices and sheds, Hardwick or Woodbury, while Hardwick Village debated over building an electric power plant. The village’s decision to go ahead with the power plant came on July 26, 1897, and two weeks later the Gazette reported that the Woodbury Granite Company would build its headquarters in Hardwick. It reported that the shed area “. . . will be a little city by itself . . . one of the most complete and extensive stone working plants in the country. . . . The company has many large orders on hand now, among which is one for several hundred car loads of cut stone for the dam soon to be erected across the Connecticut River at Holyoke.” By October, 1898, the Woodbury Granite Company had gotten into the building granite business, having “started a small building contract with about two gangs of cutters.”
A month later, recognizing that the village would need housing for the workers the industry would attract, a syndicate of 10 local businessmen bought approximately 10 undeveloped acres on the west side of the village and immediately gave four acres situated along the Hardwick & Woodbury Railroad to the Woodbury Granite Company for the site of a 200 foot long shed. The syndicate divided the rest into quarter acre building lots. Their 10 acres became two new streets of worker housing, Cottage and Granite, and what we now call Atkins Field.
The Atkins Field history was related in a talk by Elizabeth H. Dow at a recent meeting about the future of Atkins Field.
