Marble: From past to present
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As time went on, traditional methods of quarrying and uses of marble grew to include new methods as marble began to be sold in its ground form of calcium carbonate. PHOTO PROVIDED |
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By MIKE AUSTIN HERALD CORRESPONDENT - Published: June 26, 2009
There was a downside to the citizen workers' struggle for power.
The division of Rutland into separate towns showed the underside of distrust. Rutland had experienced an east-west religious geographic tension from its early foundation. By the 19th century, that tension exploded along economic and social lines.
Rutland had, for a time, overtaken its economic rival, Burlington, as the largest city in the state, but in the struggle for power in the 1880s, Rutland divided along the economic planes of city and countryside in disputes between the village and periphery. The legacy of that split hampers development today.
After 1900, the descent in company-worker relationships began. The Vermont Marble Co. had a constant oversupply of workers around the turn of the century; thus the issue was not so much the conditions at the quarries and the mills as the opportunity to work at the major employer in the area.
In the first two decades of the 20th century, the workers seemed to have made progress and after 1904, there was no significant labor conflict.
However, the workers unintentionally muted their own voices by misjudging management. Redfield Proctor, when he managed the Vermont Marble Co., lived and worked close to his workers.
Later a combination of influences and forces gradually disempowered the worker as management increasingly removed itself from the workers' daily social lives.
By the 1930s, economic forces outside and inside the valley shifted the management philosophy so it no longer valued the ideal of a close, tightly-knit community with civic responsibility. The relationship between worker and company had deteriorated into bitterness and distrust. For two generations, the bloody strike of 1934-35 stood out as the bitter legacy of the marble industry's decline. Much that workers and management had fostered, such as insurance, health care and civic projects, as well as intangible qualities such as concern and social recognition for the workers, now seemed relegated to an earlier time.
The marble worker, however, had carved out an enduring sense of place that still benefits the people of the valley.
Though the workers' voice was muted from the 1930s onward, the significant contributions of that earlier generation of managers and worker continued to benefit the present. Like other workers of the time, the marble workers educated themselves on public issues and entered into the political process.
Their voices soon dwindled, however. Woodrow Wilson, observing a change taking place in his lifetime, accelerated in ours, commented "as a nation we are becoming civically illiterate. Unless we find better ways to educate ourselves as citizens, we run the risk of drifting unwittingly into a new kind of Dark Age — a time when small cadres of specialists will control knowledge and thus control the decision-making process."
Vermont at one time had more than 700 working quarries; approximately 180 are in operation today. The Vermont Marble Co. itself and its quarries have been carved up and the few remaining small marble companies remain but shadows of what once had been.
Omya, an international company specializing in calcium carbonate products, which acquired the Vermont Marble Co., still works some of the quarries.
Marble is still quite valuable and scarce. There are more gold mines in the United States than marble quarries. However, Omya has had to find new markets for marble in face of competition from synthetic building products.
The company has transformed the marble business from a construction stone company to a world supplier of calcium carbonate and marble slurry used in toothpaste, paper, paint, detergents, electrical components and many other products
The marble workers sought a wider participatory democracy that enfranchised not just an elite but all the worker-citizens of the valley. The marble they had worked so hard to extract and finish has become an ironic symbol of their struggle. Marble, once the symbol of wealth and decoration for a small elite now supports, in the form calcium carbonate, the everyday needs of many, improving their daily lives.
Omya continues in the legacy of civic responsibility laid down by the three generations of the Proctor family In recent years, Omya has shown its concern for planned reclamation of land and financial support to the community and community projects.
Omya contributes to many Rutland County organizations such as private and public school, humanities projects, for example, Cross Roads Arts Council and the Paramount Theatre, public television, service clubs such as Brownies and Girl Scouts and health organizations.
The political power of the region as a whole and of the Vermont Marble Co. in particular has declined. Marble industry corporations influenced Vermont until the early 1960s.
In the first half of the 20th century, most Vermont governors had connections directly and indirectly with the marble industry, and many came from Marble Valley. Redfield Proctor, two of his sons and a grandson were governors of Vermont.
Of the seven presidents of the Vermont Marble Co. during its existence, five also served as governors of the state and one was a U.S. senator. After 1960, political power shifted and Rutland's rival, Burlington, in Chittenden County, became the state's power base.
Control of the Vermont Marble Co. itself moved outside the valley, and, indeed, outside the country. Omya is headquartered in Switzerland. The Vermont Quarries Corp. a subsidiary of a joint Italian partnership known as R.E.D, runs the Danby Quarry, previously owned by the Vermont Marble Co. since 1902 and at one time one of the largest underground marble quarries in the world. Officially, the Vermont Marble Co. went out of business in 1992.
Marble Minutes is designed to show the history of the marble industry in Vermont and its importance in shaping the identity of our region. It is part of the Dimensions of Marble program, which through its distinct projects, will bring together the history of the marble quarries and workers, the communities in which they lived, the artistry of sculptors, past and present and the people, who through generations, created a multitude of new projects and brought prosperity to the region.
For more information on Dimensions of Marble, visit www.dimensionsonsofmarble.org or e-mail Megan Smith, executive director at info@dimensionsofmarble.org. Mike Austin, Ph.D., is project director of Teaching American History at Castleton State College.
For more information about Teaching American History, check out www.tahvt.org.