The Granite Industry of Southwestern New Brunswick: A Historical ...

88 The Granite Industry of Southwestern New Brunswick: A Historical Perspective
Above: JAMER Materials Ltd. quarry and facilities, Bayside, New Brunswick.
Quarry 33, now on Crown Land), crushing stone for landscaping,
retaining walls and construction aggregate. Fundy Contractors
Ltd. of Bethel owns the Townsend Quarry (Map 2, 52) and a
newer black granite quarry on the South Glenelg Road. The Bethel
company is receiving a growing number of orders for riprap to
buttress and reinforce wharves affected by rising sea levels along the
Bay of Fundy.
Farther north, in Queens County, granite is being quarried
on Crown Land near the old Eagle Rock operation (Map 6, 63) to
obtain crushed stone for highway asphalt production.
Comparing crushed stone with polished granite columns is
a bit like equating chipboard with burnished mahogany. Even so,
these aggregate quarries near Bayside, St. George and Welsford
provide a natural resource that helps to support the socioeconomic
fabric of southwestern New Brunswick.
You can still touch the vestiges of southwestern New Brunswick’s
granite heritage. Many buildings in Saint John, Fredericton,
Moncton and Bathurst—not to mention Quebec City, Montreal,
Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, Chicago, New York,
Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Washington—feature the
salmon-red granite columns of St. George, as smooth and glossy
as the day they left the polishing sheds so many decades ago.
Graveyards across the province hold red, pink, grey and black
monuments of stone from quarries near Lake Utopia, Digdeguash,
Bonny River, Bocabec and The Ledge, many of them set on a base
of pinkish grey granite from Hampstead.
In St. George, on mantelpieces or tucked into attics, you
occasionally can find stone balls, tabletops, hatpin heads, urns,
ornaments, and door stops created over long winter nights by
granite workers from another century.
And in the St. George Rural Cemetary (see p. 23), you can
pause beside the lovingly carved gravestones produced by—and
placed over—the many scores of men who died before their time,
leaving behind a legacy of beauty in stone.
In 2012 a new generation of stone artisans arrived in southwestern
New Brunswick as part of Sculpture Saint John, an
international sculpture symposium.
For several weeks that summer, six acclaimed artists from
around the world carved 120 tons of granite into a sextet of sculptures
using stone from St. George (Map 3, 38 and 39) and Hampstead. The
stone was kindly donated by the Town of St. George and Debly
Enterprises Ltd., respectively. The works have since been installed
permanently at Grand Bay-Westfield, Quispamsis, Rothesay, Saint
John—and, of course, St. George.