There is a wealth of misinformation
surrounding the marble industry. One example is illustrated here. Many people assume marble has value.
Over the years I have had prospectors and land owners come to me with
accounts describing the number of acres of marble they have. Always
accompanied with the statement of inexhaustible supply. Or how often
individuals ask me if I would store, or buy salvaged marble slabs
from them.
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| Marble mill blocks in the rain forest |
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| 25-foot long mill blocks left over from the Juneau Capitol job |
To many the idea of thousands of
already-quarried marble blocks lying abandoned in the rain forest of
SE Alaska seems preposterous. Yet these blocks have laid peacefully
on Marble Island Alaska for over one hundred years. There must be
some reason for this.
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| Swimming in an abandoned quarry |
Through a romantic lens, marble mill
blocks in your back yard would seem to harbor value, however, as a
grizzled stone industry entrepreneur, I realize stone in itself has
little value. It only acquires value when you invest your time and
money in it. This is typically not understood by prospectors and site
owners since from their perspective the stone on their land has
value and they expect monetary rewards leaving the risk and
investment to someone else. I have always found this to be the case.
Marble fever like Gold fever. Easy to understand. In this case the
marble blocks have to be transported to a location with
infrastructure to saw the blocks into slabs. No such place exists in
Alaska. Finished slabs may have value. Risky business, in the stone
industry you are competing against the world in sawing technology
costs. USA, India, China, Brazil, Italy, Spain, all tough customers
to compete with locally.
The dreamer looks at this situation and
thinks it must be possible to set up a diamond wire saw and saw one
slab at a time, a technology he has seen in stone journals or
television specials. (This single wire technology may work in some
situations but will not work well in the competitive slab market.)
This stone is so unique, has such historic value that surely people
will pay what it costs to produce locally. After all we live in an
age of local is better. Such naivete. (See my essay Local Knowledge).
For the business reality is, white marble competes with other white
marble for the white marble market. Few people are discriminating
enough to see the difference between them when they are spending
their money. Many a local architect or potential commercial or
residential customer inquires about using a local material only to
say upon receiving your proposal, what do you mean local material
costs more then Carrara shipped all the way from Italy.
Everyone who travels to the Apuane Alps
looks at the great marble mountains with wonder and romance, only the
Italians can generate, as they do with so many products, but it's a
rare tourist who stops by the stone factories below, churning out
slabs of marble and granite from mill blocks shipped in from
throughout the world to be gang sawed with great efficiency then
shipped by container back to the world at ocean fright rates. ITS
ALL ABOUT GANGSAWING EFFICENCY, ALWAYS HAS BEEN SINCE 1950.
Vermont Marble Company did just that
around the turn of the century, setting up gang saws in Tacoma and
San Francisco and supplied thousands of square feet of white marble
for commercial building throughout the west until the bottom dropped
out of construction around 1929. The Italians developed faster and
cheaper sawing systems than was done in the USA. This along with
international port to port freight rates gave Carrara a competitive
edge.
It's a rare and special American who is
willing to pay the cost of local material for his or her home or
commercial project. Italian romance is hard to overcome since it is
also the cheapest. It seems to me that the primary reason all these
saw blocks languish in the rain forest is because of international
competition for white marble provided by massive sawing economies of
scale and international ocean fright rates.
So why doesn’t some wealthy investor
see this opportunity and set up a modern gang saw operation in
Seattle or San Francisco and barge these saw blocks there and
provide local material at a slightly higher cost then Carrara? It
would be to risky -- one color is not enough to sustain a sawmill.
The volume of sales would never pay the costs. One only has to spend
a little time on the internet to see what a silly idea it would be
today. Marble brokers have the world at there fingertips with much
less risk.
I think environmentalists (I studied
physical geography, biology, and urban studies in college in the
1970s planing to be an environmental planner ) who speak of local
products being more environmentally friendly do not take into
consideration modern container shipping.
I always smile to myself when someone
tells me they used concrete, poured on top their kitchen counters
rather then foreign granite. There jaw usually drops when I ask them
if they think blasting limestone from eastern Oregon, crushing it,
then cooking it up to 2500 degrees releasing noxious gases, then
trucking it to Portland, then dredging the Willamette river for sand,
mixing it up and pouring it on to your ever expanding and
contracting wooden counters then sealing it with some chemical so the
man made limestone won't immediately react with your food, is more
environmentally friendly then drilling and splitting a stone mill
block from the ground sawing and grinding it with diamond blades
(no chemicals only abrasion) then port to port container shipping is
more environmentally friendly? REALLY. Some trendy ideas just fool
the general public and they get stuck with a vastly inferior counter
at the same cost as natural stone and you had a guy who knew how to
use a trowel rather then a master craftsmen do your job, such a deal.
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| Some photos of local fabrication and finished stone counter at Conrad Stonecutter in Portland, Oregon |
Local use of local stone, in this
instance, as much as I would like to see it happen, will likely never
occur. But we can take the raw product, stone slabs, from throughout
the world and add value locally, a remarkably unique business in
today’s US economic situation Just what this country needs.
I knew all this as I tramped about the
Alaskan rain forest looking at indigenous marble resources
WHAT THEN TO DO WITH THIS
BEATUFUL ALASKAN MARBLE
Chapter 4.
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| Alaskan mill blocks in Portland |
