Rock through the Ages

Everyone's so caught up with the transformation the Internet has wrought that it's easy to forget that we've seen change before. One century-old quarry, Graniterock, has certainly learned a thing or two about dealing with it.

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This century-old quarry has learned something about dealing with change

On a squally Sunday night in mid-February, some 1,600 people hurtle in from the rain, settling themselves down for dinner in the echoey, hangarlike Esplanade Ballroom in San Francisco's Moscone Center. Round tables that seat 10 are elegantly laid with white linen, heavy silverware, tapered candles, and delicate orchid centerpieces. And the crowd's standard workaday wardrobe -- hard hats, scuffed boots, well-worn jeans, and chambray shirts -- has metamorphosed for this one night into the classic accoutrements of formal dress: black tuxes and bow ties, sparkling earrings and sequined gowns. It's a big night, after all: the 100th-anniversary gala thrown by Graniterock. The company has been in the ancient and unimaginably gritty business of quarrying and crushing rock ever since Valentine's Day, 1900.

CEO Bruce Woolpert, grandson of the company's founder, takes the stage to extend his personal welcome. He speaks of the special importance of this centennial, singling out for special attention the woman who led the company during the 1950s and 1960s and again in the 1980s: his mother, Betsy Woolpert. Then, as the Monterey County Symphony Orchestra floods the room with the national anthem, everybody stands and sings, hands over hearts.

Over the past hundred years Graniterock has learned a little something about dealing with radical change, especially the kind that's driven by new technologies. You think we're in a business revolution now, thanks to digital technology? Imagine what it was like to deal with the lightning-fast adoption of such technologies as the horseless carriage, radio, television, air travel, and the steel-framed skyscraper. Not to mention vast social changes, from the labor crises of the early 20th century to universal suffrage and the increasing role of women in the workforce. Through innovation and ambition, Graniterock has seen and absorbed it all without changing its basic function: digging rock from the ground. It is also a company with institutional memory, with a lore of its own, so it has a special perspective on what really changes when revolutions occur.

At the turn of the last century, a young engineer and MIT graduate named Arthur R. Wilson, together with several partners, bought a granite-rich 27-acre parcel. Logan Quarry was in central California's Rancho Las Aromitas y Agua Caliente, one of many land grants made by the Spanish government during its rule. (In 1988, Logan would be renamed the Arthur R. Wilson Quarry, in honor of its founder.) The purchase price was $10,000 in gold coins, a sum Wilson borrowed from his cousin, using a life-insurance policy as collateral. On February 14, 1900, Granite Rock Co. was born. "Under California law," Bruce Woolpert explains, "you had to declare how long your company would last when you incorporated, and Wilson thought, 'Fifty years.' Nobody said stuff like that then. Fifty years was longer than the average person's life expectancy in 1900. Men died at 46 and women at 48. So Wilson saw beyond a lifetime."

Wilson was a hands-on kind of guy. As company superintendent, he hitched up a two-mule team for his daily trek from the office in downtown Watsonville to the quarry. A.R., as he was called, had a thing for applying scientific principles to practical problems. His timing was excellent: there he stood, at the dawn of the industrial era, in good old California, the gold-rush state, a state on the make. The Southern Pacific Railroad had already relentlessly tentacled its way south, an expansion that sparked insatiable demand for rail-bed ballast and, a year or two later, for high-quality building materials for roads and structures. Wilson and his new company would produce a lot of those materials, construct buildings, and lay granite-enriched concrete to make roads, literally paving the way for the boom times to come.

Advances in technology and materials over the past couple of decades have spectacularly altered Graniterock's business but never its primary business focus. The company has confronted all manner of upheavals and catastrophes, some of them real Old Testament­level disasters: wars, depressions, earthquakes, newfangled machinery, stock-market plunges, and bigger competitors bent on stealing its market. Survival has done wonders for the company's confidence. Who's afraid of a little economic upheaval when your quarry sits adjacent to the fabled San Andreas Fault, the most active quake zone in California? But there's a bright side: the ground shakes enough to prefracture rock, saving Graniterock 50¢ a ton in excavation costs.

Granite is a particularly adamantine igneous rock composed mostly of feldspar and quartz. The infamously stubborn strength of the stuff makes it a superlative building material, nearly impossible for anything other than Mother Nature to fracture. Yet through the beginning of the 20th century, it was muscle and muscle alone that dislodged 175 tons of rock every day at Wilson's quarry. Working in 10-hour shifts, tough men pummeled the craggy quarry face with 20-pound sledgehammers, then shoveled the shattered rock onto pitchforks, and finally dumped it into flat railcars. Quarrymen could produce rock in only two sizes, known as six-inch-plus (bigger than six inches) and six-inch-minus (smaller than six inches).

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