Rock of Ages and Cabot Creamery

Thursday, Oct. 2, 2014

Limehurst Lake Campground

Williamstown, VT

Our morning dawned with sunshine today.  Oreo is enjoying Limehurst Lake.

Limehurst Lake has a beautiful backdrop of Fall colors.

A very peaceful place.  We were lucky to get the one 50 AMP sites available.

Our first stop today was to Rock of Ages Granite Quarry just 5 miles up the road from the campground.

The quarry offered tours of the quarry and artist building so we signed up.

George B. Milne, one of the three founders of Rock of Ages, opened his first granite business in 1885.  They sold Medium Barre and dark Barre Granite.  The deposit of granite is 4 miles wide, 25 miles long and 10 miles deep.  They figure there is enough granite to keep them in business for the next 4,000 years.

The current Smith quarry in Graniteville is 600 feet deep. 

They use diamond drills and water to cut under the block and down the back to break off the pieces.

A huge boom is used to bring it up to the inventory yard where it is measured and graded for transport to the design studio to be cut into smaller pieces.

This was an example of how the block looks when it is drilled.

One of the products produced here are giant granite rollers used in paper manufacturing.  Two rollers are precision cut to match each other.

This is what the quarry looks like from below.  We were standing on the cliff in the background to view down into the quarry.

This place has some heavy duty fork lifts.

Inventory yard.

This is The Memorial Design Studio that uses sand blasting to etch designs in the granite for memorials, signs, and works of art.

These are memorial stones being engraved by using rubber sheets that allows the artists to blast only the areas they want a design on, the sand bounces off the rubber that protects the rest of the stone.

They also do full size statues.  There are sand blasting rooms where they do the blasting so no workers have to inhale the dust.

Every piece is moved around on rollers or using a large overhead crane as it goes through the design stages.  Granite from this quarry weighs over 100 lbs. per cubic foot.

You can see there is lots of work available.  This granite is described as gray/blue in color.

They tried making bowling alleys out of granite but it never took off.  They use rubber bowling balls.

We decided to try it out.

This is some of the sample memorials at Rock of Ages.

This was using a black granite from another area.

Once you visit the Rock of Ages, it was recommended that you also visit the Hope Cemetery in Barre as all the memorials are done in Vermont Granite from the quarry.  We spotted this church in Barre on the way.

So many cool steeples in the Northeast.

The gates of Hope Cemetery are all Vermont Granite.  Many tour buses are seen in this cemetery.  

There are many granite mausoleums with brass doors and stain glass windows.

Notice that all the stones are the same color.

Wild turkeys were spotted wandering through the head stones.

Anything is possible when it comes to memorials.

This was a beautiful memorial to husband and wife.

If you can dream it up, they can make it.

We left the Hope Cemetery headed for Cabot, VT for our next stop.

The trees in the sunshine was to beautiful to pass up a photo opt.

Cabot Creamery was our next stop.  They offered cheese tasting and tours of the cheese making plant.

The whey is taken off the cheese and put through this RO filter system to get the protein from the milk liquids and turn it into water to be used in the plant again.

The three tubes show each stage of the filtration until it becomes clear water.

Stirring the curds on the cheese table.

The curds are drained (going to the RO room) and compressed into wheels or blocks to be put into boxes for the storage room to age.

This machine boxes the cheese.

Vermont Cabot cheese is sold everywhere in the US.  It is a farmer owned co-op and all profits from the sales go directly to the farmers that produced the milk.  Everyone making and marketing the cheese works for the farmers.  They tried marketing their cheese in the west but no one would buy white cheese so they now color it yellow for the west coast sales. 

We took a rest and maintenance day Friday to catch up Blogs and laundry before we move to our new location of Burlington, VT Saturday.

Becky and Lonnie