GRANITE SHEDS

The first large sheds for working granite in Barre and elsewhere in the United States followed a design developed in the Roman period: a one-story, wood-frame, horseshoe-shaped shed that surrounds a central derrick pole for hoisting heavy stones from ox carts onto stone sleds used to move stone into each bay of the shed. Although at one time there were more than two dozen such sheds in Barre and Montpelier, only three bays of a single shed remain on Blackwell Street, built about the time that the 1875 railroad spur from Montpelier gave Barre its first rail transport. In 1889, the E. L. Smith Company experimented with an enclosed modification of the old design on the south side of Burnham Street 23 Burnham Meadows. There it built a large two-story, wood-frame, sixteen-sided circular granite shed with a massive center pole for use as its derrick hoist. Its original sixteen-sided rooftop cupola burned in a 1968 fire, but the shed survives as the oldest operating granite shed in Barre.

Although imitated on occasion, the circular design was never common and was superseded in the 1890s by extended two-story sheds designed to accommodate railroad tracks and an overhead bridge crane along their length, usually with one-story shed-roofed bays for stonework flanking one or both eaves sides. An outstanding example of this type that populates the Stevens Branch in Barre and was once found along the Winooski River in Montpelier is Jones Brothers Building No. 1 of 1895.

Marshall, Seward, Dayton, and Hugh Jones, who had a granite business in Boston, purchased a quarry on “Millstone Hill” in east Barre in 1886 and opened a monument-cutting shed in Barre village. At the same time as the 1889 Barre Railroad Company's “Sky Route” would ease transport from the quarry, the Jones brothers pioneered the use of pneumatic tools, and their business rapidly expanded after 1891. In 1895, they purchased a new site for their stone-cutting business along the railroad west of the village and built one of the first bridge-crane sheds, a horseshoe-shaped shed measuring 75 × 290 feet in plan. Here the Jones Brothers Company manufactured the massive granite columns for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City along with numerous other memorials and monuments. In 1921 the company's works encompassed 100,000 square feet of floor space, with 300 men employed and annual sales of $500,000.

Around 1925 the company added a neoclassical office building that remains just south of Building No. 1. The two-story, hipped-roof, wood-frame building features Tuscan columns, corner pilasters, and an elaborate cornice, and it is probably the most detailed granite company building erected during the industry's early-twentieth-century boom years. The Jones Brothers Company plant closed in 1975. Today the Vermont Granite Museum of Barre, which acquired the fourteen-acre site in the late 1990s, has rehabilitated the granite storage shed for use as an exhibition space and stone-working school.