Blue Granite & An American Stonehenge

By Tom Poland 
March 28, 2014

When I was a boy a pile of crushed blue granite, kindly deposited by the highway department along the shoulder of the road always caught my eye. Cone-shaped, the critical angle of repose at work, the pile of blue-white stones glittered like diamonds. I’d get a bag and load up on the smaller rocks, the ones that worked best in my slingshot. Then it was target time in the woods.

I came across blue granite in cemeteries wandering among the tombstones at my church. Another exposure to blue granite came from the long, smooth, beautiful shafts of granite well drills pulled out of the ground.

In high school we had nothing to do. Many nights we’d lounge around the Confederate monument. (I guess the PC police will come after me now.) Five or six of us would loiter and watch the traffic on Highway 378. I don’t recall that we ever discussed the Civil War during those long, boring evenings.

And then college and career came and my contact with granite dwindled to things like paperweights. My next involvement with blue granite was doleful. Ten years after my father’s death I find myself crossing paths with blue granite again, and this time it’s a comfortable thing. Granite makes fine countertops, long-lasting memorials, and elegant buildings, but someone must wrestle it from the embrace of Mother Earth, and therein lies a good story. Thus did I find myself exploring old quarries, making notes for books, and taking photographs.

One summer day photographer, Robert Clark, and I explored the old Kincaid-Anderson Quarry near Winnsboro. A large slab of granite bars access at the entrance near the turbine building. We found a place where we could exhale deeply and squeeze through a space between the old turbine building and a cyclone fence grown over with vines. Another pound each and we would have had to climb the fence. Making our way through brush and pines and vigilant for rattlers, we climbed to a promontory of sorts, a flat expanse of granite crisscrossed by large rusting steel cables. Quarry walls and green water surrounded us. It’s one of those places where you stand, stare, and say not a word. When at last we spoke our words reverberated and ricocheted around us in this echo chamber carved out of planet Earth.

 

The quarry is deep with emerald water. Here you think is where missing people sleep. How many stolen cars rust beneath these waters? I stared at the massive walls where water’s runoff streaked the walls black. Relics of busier times included a granite block building with its roof long gone, iron steps descending into the stagnant water, and all manner of pipes.

One thing and one thing only marred the place. Vandals have painted graffiti and their names on the granite walls. Had better economics kept the old mine open those disgraced walls might be some grand edifice paying homage to some famed person or event. 

Across a lagoon huge blocks of granite were heaped upon one another helter-skelter as a temper-tantrum-throwing toddler tosses wooden blocks into a pile. What power it took to sling those blocks into a pile. A cubic foot of granite weighs 170 pounds. The huge blocks probably come out at 40 tons each. That power came from the old Joy turbine.

The granite lasted; the quarry didn’t. The Joy turbine that powered the machinery where men cut and heaved blue granite from Fairfield County earth stands rusting. There was no joy and all was blue come 1946. To this day steel cables crisscross the quarry right where they were abandoned and grief-stricken cranes lean against granite walls. Their rusty tears streak the granite.

Architects, designers, and sculptors, among others, coveted Winnsboro blue for beautiful buildings and monuments along the east coast, indeed the world. The granite here is destined to remain right where it slowly solidified and cooled to stake its claim as Earth’s signature rock.

I am no geologist but looking at maps I suspect the deposits of granite in Fairfield County South Carolina are cousins to the granite in Elbert County Georgia. The abundant granite in Elbert County gives Elberton, Georgia, the rationale to brand itself as The Granite Capital of the World. I suspect my father’s sepulcher came from the granite capital of the world. 

Blue granite. What a versatile thing. Besides the mausoleums, tombstones and granite products produced in Elbert County, the local football team, the Blue Devils, plays in the 20,000-seat Granite Bowl, which uses the old University of Georgia Sanford Stadium scoreboard. All the fame generated by that scoreboard, however, is one-upped by what some call an American Stonehenge standing on a rise just east of Highway 77 in Elbert County. The Georgia Guidestones, as they’re called, stand on the highest point in Elbert County. A man using the pseudonym, R.C. Christian, hired Elberton Granite Finishing Company to build the structure. To this day no one save one man, a banker, knows his real name and the banker vows to take the secret to his grave. 

Chiseled into the nearly 20-foot high granite slabs are admonitions for a future Age of Reason. A CNN writer referred to Guidestones as an astronomically complex, 120-ton relic of Cold War fears, built to instruct survivors of an Armageddon that the mystery man feared was all too near.

Read and go forth …
1.     Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2.     Guide reproduction wisely—improving fitness and diversity.
3.     Unite humanity with a living new language.
4.     Rule passion—faith—tradition—and all things with tempered reason.
5.     Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6.     Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7.     Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8.     Balance personal rights with social duties.
9.     Prize truth—beauty—love—seeking harmony with the infinite.
10.    Be not a cancer on the earth—Leave room for nature—Leave room for nature.

Christian’s 10 principles are cut into the four vertical slabs, front and back, each side in a different language. Egyptian hieroglyphics, Babylonian cuneiform, Sanskrit and classical Greek inscribe the capstone.

 

A slot in the center column permits observation of the transit of the sun throughout the seasons. A hole higher up focuses on Polaris, the North Star. A hole in the capstone focuses a shaft of sunlight onto the central pillar at noon. These attributes let survivors of Christian’s coming apocalypse reproduce the calendar, clock, and compass. Things a civilization must have. The Guidestones, by the way, attract controversy from critics who call them Satanic. Some call for them to be destroyed.

Blue granite. Mankind’s big slate. Upon it we put all manner of messages. We build things with it. We make art with it and play football games within it. We make seats of government from it too.

There’s something about this blue-white stone that I love. On my desk is a granite rock I commandeered from the watery clench of the Chattooga. It’s been a life-long love affair filled with joy and sadness as love affairs are wont. Somewhere in the woods back home my slingshot catapulted a million pieces of granite across the land. Perhaps some future archaeologist will unravel the mystery of how those bits of granite were strewn over the place. A primitive weapon and amusement for boys his learned paper will read. 

Hard, durable, and impervious, blue granite softens the hard edges of our lives. In it we find a record keeper. We remember our rock-slinging youth because of it. We memorialize fallen soldiers and lost causes with it. We prepare our meals upon its surface. We lay our loved ones to rest with it, and we try, sometimes dramatically, to persuade mankind to live and act in accordance with injunctions and guidance.

When we see the quarries that birthed it, we should never forget the hard labor that wrests it free.

Blue granite, a stone from deep within the earth’s bosom, makes for a place of eternal rest. Late one afternoon driving along a backroad in North Carolina I saw a grand angel of granite, wings outstretched in a small cemetery, overlooking an even smaller family plot framed in rusting wrought iron. Dogwoods bloomed but their bracts had begun to fall … tears of alabaster you might say. Spring was trailing away. Blue granite, however, is in season year round. Blue granite, a rock of ages, is a stone you can’t take for granted. 

 

 

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Tom Poland is the author of seven books and more than 700 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press will soon release his and Robert Clark’s book, Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.