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Chapter 6. Quarry Actions—Striking Again
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135 6 Quarry Actions—Striking Again { [Ralph Waldo Emerson] offered a biting commentary on the relationship between the two slaveries cited by North and South alike, that of the black, or chattel, slave, and that of the wage-slave selling his or her time to the industrialist without a share in the product. His resentment of the idea that some need not labor, that their triumph was defined as progress, expresses a strong opposition to the beliefs and propaganda of the capitalists. —Lawrence Gross, The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1835–1955 The first tragedy of mortality is that nothing lasts, but the first glory of human consciousness is the capacity to regain, by simple thought, what is lost to time. The merely chronological becomes personal. Memory is half of how you do this. . . . The other half . . . is by anticipating the future. Worry is the most obvious mode of doing this. —James Carroll, Boston Globe, January 1, 2007 Their experience breaking rocks on the public works in famine Ireland equipped the Irish for marble quarrying, it has been said (Healy communication, July 2002). More likely, though, it was the Kilglass men’s experience in the stone quarries of their home parish or the limestone ones in adjacent Kilmore, whose product was used both for construction and for agriculture (Lewis 1837). Some of Rutland’s Irish quarry men may also have worked for a time building canals in the United States or Canada. In any case, the Irish in Rutland went into the quarries in great number in the early and middle 1850s, almost as soon as the railroad tracks they had laid connected Rutland with marble markets. As their jobs on Rutland’s many rail lines ended, work in rail operations and quarrying opened up. Marble expanded rapidly. Rail lines marked a critical turning point for Rutland because they enabled the growing marble extraction industry to move its massive product more easily to market. The industry at Rutland had been crippled by the difficulty and expense of hauling huge blocks of marble overland by oxcart 136 Chapter Six to Whitehall on the New York border. Starting in the 1850s, however, such inhibitions on the industry faded away, and the Irish moved into the quarries in large numbers to cut the stone from its solid beds. Even before the industry’s enormous growth spurt in the 1850s, two local figures apparently had made fortunes, by then-current standards, in marble. William F. Barnes quarried marble, and in 1850 his personal real estate was valued at $12,000 [$309,590], plus he had $40,000 [$1 million] of capital in his quarry operation; William Ripley was a Rutland marble dealer with $19,600 [$506,000] in personal real estate. The 1850 census documented only twenty other people in the marble business: fourteen of them were stonecutters, mostly native-born Americans but three from Ireland and one each from Canada, England, and Scotland. Three other marble dealers and several marble supervisors lived in the town, but none had real estate exceeding $1,000 in value [$25,799]. The 1850 census, however, must mask quarry workers who were listed simply as laborers or blacksmiths but who performed those jobs for quarry operations. Local historian Dawn Hance said that three hundred men were working in four local quarries as early as 1848, most of them “Irish immigrants who had come to work either in railroad construction or in the quarries. The next year another hundred workers had been hired” (1991, p. 542). Evidently, the quarry workers were camouflaged as general laborers in that census. A few years later, census data—both St. Bridget’s Parish Census in 1857 and the federal census in 1860—specified when a man worked in the quarries; by then, the workforce was almost exclusively Irish. Moving into the Quarries William Colligan was one of the first Kilglass men to go into quarry work in the 1830s, at Slason and Barnes (Butler letter, March 12, 1969), and he undoubtedly helped friends and relatives to obtain quarry jobs. But then Colligan uprooted his family and briefly went west (Madden communication , 2002). By the early 1850s, however, the Colligans had returned to Rutland, and William probably worked for William Barnes’s operation, which, Michael Austin found, had thirty-five employees in 1845, eighty in 1854, and an equal number from St. Bridget’s Parish alone in 1857 (St. Bridget’s Parish Census...