"Quarries provided city 'golden age of stone'" from the June 10, 1976 Door County Advocate
By STANLEY GREENE
The Laurie Quarry, with John Laurie on bank in upper right.
Quarries provided city 'golden age of stone'
By STANLEY GREENE
The first indelible mark that the white man left on the shores of Sturgeon Bay were the scars of his quarrying. Over a period of 145 years those scars were extended from Hibbard's Bluff on the east shore up the bay to the east side of Big Creek; on the west shore, from Government Bluff up past the foot of Hickory Street. Ugly? Perhaps, but not when one considers what came out of them. Their stone made some of the finest harbors on Lake Michigan, built hundreds of beautiful and enduring buildings, on both its shores, and helped to make smooth and firm the advent of the Automobile Age.
The quarries of the bay made it possible to take the cheapest and most abundant natural resource of the area and turn it into a valuable export at a crucial time in the economy of Sturgeon Bay. They were an important element in developing the shipyards and the shipping facilities of the bay. Unlike the saw mills and the huge ice houses, the quarries were, with one possible exception, the product of local initiative. Their story is one of the most vivid and interesting chapters of our local history.
It began in 1832 when the government opened a quarry at the foot of the bluff overlooking Sawyer Harbor on the west shore of the bay. Stone was needed for a harbor project at the southern end of Lake Michigan. Perhaps the reason for selecting that site was the report that Samuel Stambaugh, the Indian Agent at Fort Howard, had made the year before on "The Quality and Condition of the Wisconsin Territory." Two of the things he emphasized in connection with "Big" Sturgeon Bay (to distinguish it from the other Sturgeon Bay a few miles to the southwest) was its "commodious and beautiful" harbor and the "best stone that can be required for building (which) may be had in any quantities." If it was, then Secretary of the Treasury, Levi Woodbury, added his approval of Stambaugh's recommendation by securing from Congress the establishment of a "Government Reservation" of a hundred acres of land at the mouth of Big Sturgeon Bay "...for the purpose of providing good stone in all weather."
It was this combination of a "good" harbor and "good" stone, easy of access, and in great quantities that in 1880 was to usher in a "golden age of stone" on Sturgeon Bay.
A period of a quarter of a century was required from the first large permanent settlement on the bay to the opening of its first, large commercial quarry. In the interim a few small quarry operations were started to satisfy small local demands — more for the lime to make plaster than for stone to make buildings.
Elijah Fuller, whose homestead was located on the west shore at the terminus of the Little Sturgeon Road, was probably the first to offer the product of his lime-kiln for sale of his neighbors. By 1870, he was "burning" and selling more than a thousand kegs of lime a year. Over on the east shore, Robert Laurie, down near the mouth of the bay, decided to build himself a stone house to replace his log cabin. He quarried the rock himself and made the lime for the plaster. It was the first stone house, and for several decades the only stone house, on the shores of the bay. However, there was no interest in his stone but a great deal of the quality of his lime. Shortly Robert Laurie was doing as big a lime business as Fuller.
In the village of Sturgeon Bay, a small local demand for stone, mostly for foundations, basements and the boiler rooms of the saw mills and the grist mill, produced a small quarry at the northern edge of the village at the end of what is now North Fourth Avenue. Called the Sturgeon Bay Quarry it probably was opened up in the period after the Civil War when the village began to raise its buildings from the ground or from the cedar posts upon which the sills rested to build foundations and even basements of stone under them. The quarry was one of William Wagener's first investments when he and his brother Arnold came to the village in the early 1870's and its stone was used for the vaulted basement that formed a part of the facilities of the village's first brewery built by the brothers.
It was not until 1880, with the opening of the canal for heavy traffic, that an opportunity was provided for the development of large-scale commercial quarries. By giving a shorter route to most of the lake ports, transportation costs for local products were reduced, making them more competitive. This stimulation to local economy triggered a local building boom that looked to more durable and fire-resistance material than wood. With both a local and an area market for stone, local initiative had at last the opportunity it needed to begin large-scale quarrying operations.
There is no clear evidence who was first with the big quarry. Probably, Robert Laurie who, with his son John, organized the Laurie Stone Quarry Co. in 1880 and by May was in operation, hauling stone-laden scows up the bay to the village for constructing the basement and foundations of A.W. Lawrence's huge new business block. Almost as quickly, Louis R. McLachlan was opening a quarry on his homestead on the east bank of Big Creek, up near the new canal. Which ever of the two was first, it is estimated that both quarries produced and sold about the same amount of stone that year — 900 cords each.
Two more quarries were opened in 1885. Elijah Fuller's son-in-law, who had taken over the operation of Fuller's lime-kiln began full-scale quarrying on the Fuller homestead. Two Green Bay men, Hagen and English, operating the government quarry at the mouth of the bay under a permit which required them to sell all the stone to government projects, decided to go private and began a quarry a little distance to the north of the Brewster's. Both were inside the limits of City of Sturgeon Bay as established by the consolidation of 1891. In 1893, the Leathem & Smith Co. turning away from the lumber business and looking for more profitable lines, opened a quarry site on the east shore, north of the Laurie Quarry, at the mouth of the bay.
In 1895, the Brewster Quarry had used up its money and its room when it ran into the Little Sturgeon Road. It had to close. Two of the Brewster employees, Lars Jensen and Soren Termansen, began their own quarry. Working out an arrangement with the Washington Ice Co. which had property on the west shore adjacent to, and just south of, the Government Reservation (now Potawatomi State Park), they founded the Jensen-Termansen Quarry.
In 1900, Louis P. Nebel, for many years the manager of the Hagen-English (later the Hagen, then the Green Quarry) went into partnership with John Graef and began quarrying a site just north of the Green's in the Town of Nasewaupee. They also took over a newly opened quarry site on the east shore about halfway between the Laurie Quarry and the Leathem & Smith Quarry.
By the beginning of the Twentieth Century eight major quarry sites had been opened on Sturgeon Bay, and two of them — the McLachlan and the Brewster sites — had been closed. By 1903, the number of companies operating those sites would also be reduced from six to four by the merger of the Graef-Nebel and Jensen-Termansen operations as the Sturgeon Bay Stone Company, operating two quarries on the west shore and one on the east shore. One of the reasons for the merger was a more effective use of the ships owned by both companies, for the transportation of the quarried stone had become as important as the quarrying itself.
The Sturgeon Bay Stone Co. on the west side of the bay before 1911. Lars Jensen, left, president and manager, watches Richard Berg drilling holes for dynamite. Mrs. Forest Olsen contributed the picture.
In the 20 years of its development on Sturgeon Bay, production techniques in the quarries made rapid strides. In 1880, the tools used for quarrying by McLachlan and Laurie were hammers, wedges, and crowbars; the power operating them, the men who used them, at a cost of 12½ cents per hour or $1.37½ per day. Five years later, black blasting
powder was being used to replace at least a portion of the muscular power. It took a three man crew to drill the holes for the blasts; one man seated on a stool, holding the drill, while two men alternately wielded big, eight pound hammers. Once the rock was broken, instead of loading with wheel-barrows, small cars operated on moveable tracks by gravity brought the stone down to and dumped their loads in the waiting scows. By 1900, the three man drilling crew was replaced with a steam-driven drill; dynamite, ignited by an electric spark, replaced the black powder exploded by a lighted fuse. Wages had gone up to as much as $1.75 for the 11-hour working day.
Of equal importance to production was transportation. Here the quarries on the bay had the benefit of the techniques developed by the shipyards and shipping companies for handling bulky cargos such as timber and ice. Although John Leathem had retired, Thomas Smith continued the operation of the quarry and in 1903 was designing and building the biggest stone quarries on the Lakes. A few years before he had launched a stone one named the "Michael Doheraty", after the Sturgeon Bay citizen who, tired of seeing his frame blacksmith shop burn down, put up the first stone building in the city. The carrier, 202 feet long, was acclaimed the largest on the lakes. In 1903, Smith turned out an even larger one, to be used in carrying stone between Chicago and South Chicago.
1903, the beginning of the "golden age of stone" on the bay, was a particularly difficult year. There were four companies — the Laurie, Green, Smith, and Sturgeon Bay Stone Co. Operating six large quarries, the problem seemed to be less a matter of orders than the ability to fill them, the Sturgeon Bay Stone Co. for example, unloaded return to the quarry the two emptied carriers. Carriers and tugs of the quarry fleets were almost in steady operation, good weather and bad. New carriers were constantly being built or remodeled from older boats to replace the losses occasioned from striking snags or foundering.
Besides the "dead heads" in the channels, the quarries faced other snags. The booming construction business in the city and the presence of two new canning factories stripped the area of the supply of labor normally available. The Sturgeon Bay Stone Co. advertised for 50 men and couldn't get them. The Green quarry tried to pick up 30 men in Menominee and got 11 but only by the desperate expedient of raising the wages from $1.62½ to $2.00 per day. Smith Quarry found a partial solution to the problem by importing Poles and Greeks (sometimes called "Macedonians") from Chicago.
With the stone traffic added to the other and normal bay traffic (there were more than 200 steamers and schooners arriving and leaving the port in the month of November, 1903), it was estimated that during the navigation season, the bridge had to be opened, on an average, 40 times daily. And those were the days when the draw was manipulated by man-power, not electric power.
The golden age of the quarries was to culminate in the development of the largest stone quarry on the Great Lakes. In 1893, the firm of Leathern & Smith had purchased 15 or 20 acres on the east shore at the mouth of the bay. Leathem had retired from the firm before the close of the century and Thomas Smith's son, Leathem D. Smith, took over the business in 1914 on the death of his father and reactivated the business which had slowed almost to a stop.
A new and important phase in the stone business on the bay had been introduced in 1894 when Laurie had used the first stone crusher to provide crushed stone for road construction. In 1903, Tom Smith had also started a crushed-stone operation. But when his son had taken over the business he hired the Nebel Electric Company to completely electrify the quarry crushing plant. Stone as big as three feet in diameter was taken to the crusher by an endless belt and passed through a graded series of crushers, then through graders and washers to the storage bins and eventually from the bins to the cargo vessels. The belts were all driven by electric motors. The boats, nine in all in the fleet, were equipped with self-unloading devices.
By 1917, the company was the only firm on the bay engaged in crushing stone. By 1921, it was employing more than a hundred men and producing annually 175,000 tons of stone selling for $325,000. The company reorganized in 1925, increasing production to 350,000 tons selling at $400,000. By 1927, production had been raised to 600,000 tons. That year it was sold to Dolomite Inc. of Cleveland, Ohio for $675,000 — the largest sale of property or industry made up to that time in Door County. Great expectations were held for its future but by the early 1930's these had been destroyed by the depression and a changing stone market. With the closing of the last large commercial quarry on the bay, Sturgeon Bay's golden age of stone came to a close.
Radio is nothing new to Stanley Greene of "What's Your Opinion?" fame. He was mayor from 1950 to 1962 and had a program on the Advocate-affiliated station WOKW. He also wrote a weekly column for the paper.
Courtesy of the Door County Library Newspaper Archive
Articles by Stanley Greene
https://doorcounty.substack.com/t/stanley-greene