Rock of ages

Limestone quarry has a history of being cream of the crop

By Buddy Gough

BEAVER — The golden gleam from the wall of rock was the kind that had stoked the highest hopes of the first explorers and subsequent settlers of the Ozarks.

But before you could shout "Eureka!" Dr. Van Brahana pronounced the geological reality.

"It's iron pyrite or what is known to most people as fool's gold," the geologist with the University of Arkansas said as he hammered out a chunk of rust-colored rock bearing flecks of golden metal.

"There's a lot of it around here," Lowell Johnson said when he took Brahana on a tour of a historic quarry carved into a hillside between Leatherwood Creek and the White River.

Although the metallic rock may have fooled people in the past, no gold has ever been found in the Ozarks despite the old legends that inspired persistent searching and quite a bit of fruitless digging in the 1800s and early 1900s.

The wall of rock before Brahana and Johnson, however, exemplified a true treasure of the region in the form of layer upon layer of limestone. It is not only the rock-bottom foundation of our terrain, but also the source that defines the historic architecture of Northwest Arkansas.

While logging of our forests may have been one of the first commercial enterprises in the region, the quarrying of limestone wasn't far behind, and the one near Beaver was one of the first and most significant in the region.

QUARRY HISTORY

Now owned by Johnson and named the Ozark Southern Stone Quarry, the quarry was known as the Beaver Stone Co. in the 1880s and subsequently as the Eureka Stone Co. in the early 1900s when it was providing the building material for many of the most notable edifices of the region.

"The Crescent Hotel and Basin Park Hotel in Eureka Springs and buildings on the University of Arkansas campus were just a few buildings built with stone from this quarry," Johnson said during a visit to the quarry several weeks ago.

The information was mined from historic documents Johnson inherited when he purchased the property several years ago.

One document was a copy of a $500 bond offered to investors in 1903. It was a pretty good deal for a share in what must have been a profitable enterprise, because the bond was redeemable in gold coin along with a 6 percent annual interest rate.

An especially revealing document was a report on the quarry and the quality of its stone prepared in 1906 by what was thenthe department of geology and mining at the University of Arkansas.

Prepared by A.H. Perdue, the report described a thriving operation with a building containing steam-powered "gang saws," a cutting shed, blacksmith shop and a mule-powered hoist to load the huge stone blocks.

In those days, steam-powered steel cables "oiled" with sand and water were used to carve the stone blocks out of the quarry walls. The report noted the abundance of sand and water in the vicinity of the quarry.

A later quarrying technique involved pounding lines of holes into the rock and filling the holes with dynamite to blast out the blocks. Johnson said the miners made the holes by using sledgehammers to pound devices known as "feather-andwedges" into the rock.

"They drove three featherand-wedges at a time and sang a song to keep time with their blows, hitting left, right and in the middle," Johnson said.

The most significant part of the 1906 geological report concerned tests conducted on the quality of the quarry's dolomitic limestone which was rated as being of exceptional density and hardness.

While typical concrete has a crush rate of 3,000 pounds per square inch, the crush rate of the finest limestone from the quarry tested out at nearly 22,000 pounds per square inch.

Johnson has given that particular layer of limestone the name Cream and said it was the limestone the miners primarily went after even though they had to cut through 20 feet or so ofrock to get down to it.

"The Cream gets its strength from its high magnesium content; only about 3 percent of the limestone in the country can match," Johnson said.

That may explain why a sample of the stone is held at the Smithsonian Institution.

Suffice to say, the stone makes exceptional building material and it shows in how edifices like the Crescent Hotel have held up over time. It is also of good enough quality to be used for countertops and sculpted stonework.

The quarry had fallen into disuse until Johnson acquired it. Since its revival, the word of its special limestone has spread to create a growing demand near and far. Locally, the stone will be seen prominently at the new visitor center of Hobbs State Park. Recently, a major manufacturer of sporting goods is purchasing the stone for megastores being built around the country.

GEOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

The purpose of Brahana's visit was to provide Johnson with his perspective on the geology of the quarry. It is on the western edge of the Ozarks and part of the Springfield Plateau that stretches in a relatively narrowband from western Oklahoma to eastern Missouri.

The two men hit it off immediately through what was an obviously shared fascination with rock. Brahana became sort of like the proverbial kid in a candy store.

"Amazing," he said as he beheld the layers of limestone revealed in the walls of the quarry. "The geology here is more complex than I ever had a clue."

Standing before a two-tiered quarry wall about 30 feet high, Johnson pointed out the different layers of limestone of different types and colors that were being quarried for different purposes ranging from use for retaining walls to the finest construction material.

From the top of the wall to the bottom, the layers variedfrom 1 to 2 feet thick and were descriptively named Sky Blue, Southern Sky, Osage Orange and Cream.

"The Cream is just spectacular," Brahana marveled.

Closely inspecting the thick layers and thin ones in between, he pointed out special features in the rock, such as the Fool's Gold, quartzite crystals and the fossils of sea creatures from several million years ago.

Brahana also noted that the quarry as a whole featured some of the oldest rock to be found in the Ozarks.

As a visual aid, he had brought along a large poster depicting a cross section of the various formations of rock found in the Ozarks ranging from the newest to the oldest. In descending order, they included the Boone, St. Joe, Chattanooga Shale, Everton, Cotter and Powell formations.

"This limestone in this quarry is part of the Cotter Formation" and was formed about 400 million years ago, Brahana said.

One of the most interesting aspects of the visit was seeing the historic part of the quarry that remained as it was when abandoned by the miners many decades ago.

Scrambling up and down steep mounds of dirt and rock rubble and through a thick overgrowth of large trees, we came to what Johnson aptly called the Pyramid.

It consisted of a massive pile of huge limestone blocks weathered to a dark gray color.

"Some of those blocks weigh about 20 tons," Johnson said. "They just cut them out and piled them out of the way so they could get down to the Cream layer of rock they wanted."

The labor it must have taken to quarry the blocks and move them was difficult to imagine. Brahana's word for it was "awesome."

Equally impressive was a wall of the huge blocks standingnearby beside a water-filled pit.

"They would have had a derrick standing in the pit and used pulleys and mules to lift the blocks and stack then up," Johnson said.

He noted how most of the blocks had been cut free with the steam-powered steel cables, but also pointed out some that had been blasted out. One of the blocks still had one of the feather-andwedge devices imbedded in it.

Johnson said a lot of rock rubble and limestone blocks had been left in the working part ofthe quarry and were being salvaged for use, but he plans to leave the old part as it is.

He hoped someday to provide historical tours of the quarry.

"We would like to have displays of old pictures of the quarry so people could see what it was like 100 years ago and then put them in a mule-drawn wagon and take them to old part," Johnson said.

They might also take a look at the limestone layers that will take them back about 400 million years.

River Valley Ozark, Pages 142, 143 on 10/12/2008