This presentation album, showing work of the North Carolina Granite Company, bears a label that it was loaned to Charles H. Gall, an agent out of Dearborn, Michigan. The album...
This presentation album, showing work of the North Carolina Granite Company, bears a label that it was loaned to Charles H. Gall, an agent out of Dearborn, Michigan. The album contains examples of projects which used the company’s granite including monuments, bridges, banks, courthouses, facades, and other private and civil structures, including the Mississippi State Monument in Vicksburg; World War One memorials in Oak Park and Roseland, Illinois.; the Pennsylvania State Monument in Gettysburg; the Galbraith Memorial in Cincinnati, Ohio; the the Guilford Courthouse in Greensboro, North Carolina; the Union Trust Building in Washington, D.C.; the Armstrong Tunnel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and more.
The North Carolina Granite Corporation was founded on the site of the Mount Airy White Granite quarry, on the Ararat River. The quarry was first operated by the Brothers of the Morovian Church in 1743. In 1889, when the Cape Fear and Yadkin Valley Railroad was built from Greensboro to Mount Airy, Thomas Woodroofe was selected to build the railway stations along the new rail line, and he decided to use the stone from the Mount Airy Quarry. He purchased the quarry site and organized the North Carolina Granite Company. Covering more than 200 acres it is today the world’s largest open faced granite quarry and is estimated to have enough granite to continue extracting it at the current rate for 500 more years.