History of Bell Marble Quarry
Around 100 years ago, this land was owned by the Bell Family, who raised fruits and vegetables where the RV Park is now located. Ed Hill, an experienced marble worker from Vermont married one of Bell’s daughters and talked his father-in-law into letting him establish a marble quarry. The Bell Marble Quarry started operating in April of 1918, just before the end of World War I, but several problems soon developed.
First, a cable supporting the 110’ steel tower broke causing the tower to fall and, unfortunately, two men were killed. Some remnants of the old twisted tower can still be found hidden in the brush on the hill near the quarry.
Second, soon after building a new tower, it was discovered that the marble had many small cracks or ‘dry seams’ so that some of the marble was not of a high enough quality for slabs. Slabs were used on the walls and floors of banks, hotels, and other high-end buildings. The marble not of slab quality was then blasted into aggregate and fed into a crusher that was installed where the Park’s play yard is now located. This crushed marble had to be sold at a lower price, thus markedly reducing the profits.
The largest market for the crushed marble was for a chicken feed supplement called grits. Besides helping the chickens grind and digest their food better, the soluble mineral also helped build thicker egg shells.
The third disaster occurred in 1929 when the nation plunged into the Great Depression, which lasted through the 1930’s. Farmers could not afford to buy the ‘grits’ for their chickens, so the quarry and the Bell Farm were forced into bankruptcy.
How Marble was Quarried
Marble is a metamorphosed limestone, which means that the heat and pressure of the uplift of the Sierra Nevada Mountains caused the sedimentary limestone to change into a form that is composed of a myriad of tiny crystals. A freshly broken piece of marble will glisten in the sunlight, and when polished, marble has a rich elegant appearance. It contains NO GOLD and the gold found at Columbia was carried here by an ancient Amazon like river, which flowed about 35 million years ago. The Ice Ages that carved the Yosemite Valley began only about one million years ago, so you can see that what we have here predates Yosemite by millions of years.
Patience and hard work were necessary to quarry marble. An air operated jack hammer mounted on the side of a small rail car traversed back and forth on short section of track. It pounded an inch wide channel about four feet deep and about two feet behind the previous cut. Then a series of horizontal holes were made with air operated drills which intersected the bottom of the channel.
Long tapered spikes, called wedges, were driven into the holes between two pieces of steel, called feathers or shims. After hitting these wedges with a sledgehammer for some time, the marble would split into 20 ton blocks.
They were lifted out by a chain attached to a boom, which was attached to the adjacent steel tower. The concrete base for the tower can still be seen through the brush to the left of the rear of the quarry. Because of the diameter of the jackhammer, each succeeding level could not be flush with the previous level’s cut; therefore, the stair stepping appearance of the face of the quarry.
Marble, weighing 171 pounds per cubic foot, is alkaline and can be eaten away by acid water seeping down through cracks eventually forming caves. There is a huge cavern below that was deliberately sealed off, years ago.