CHAPTER 8. 

 THE GRANITE INDUSTRY .OF CAPE ANN. 



While the fisheries furnish an exhaustless field for enterprise, Cape 

 Ann has yet another branch of productive industry in which the most 

 active operations make but small apparent dimunition of the supply. 

 Her hills and fields are marked by the outcroppings of the huge ledges 

 which underlie them, mines of wealth as truly as those of Ophir, 

 whose products have been freely yielded for the construction and or- 

 namentation of the temples of the nineteenth century. Her rocks 

 are granite, of a beautiful, dark color, easily wrought into any desi- 

 rable shape, and susceptible of a high polish. 



From the earliest times the rocks of the Cape were made to serve 

 the necessities of the inhabitants, in the construction of their build- 

 ings and fences, but their merchantable value w r as a thing of slow 

 growth. The rapid growth of the fishing business in the last century, 

 and the lack of harbor accommodations on the North side of the 

 Cape, opened a new use for this abundant material, in the mooring 

 of the diminutive craft of those days off shore. Flat blocks of gran- 

 ite, about six feet square, and from ten to fifteen inches in thickness, 

 were prepared by cutting a hole fifteen inches in diameter in the cen- 

 tre, into which an oak butt, having the roots attached, was inserted. 

 The stone and spar were then dropped at a proper distance from the 

 shore, and used for the securing of fishing craft, affording a safe 

 mooring except in heavy easterly gales, when it was found necessary 



