University of Virginia Library

Quarries

Out in the county the Alberene Stone Corporation of Virginia
found military uses for its soapstone. Although the company had no
direct contracts with the government, it estimated that nearly three
million dollars worth of its product went into war purposes. Soapstone
from its Albemarle County and Nelson County quarries was
manufactured into laboratory and photographic development equipment,
such as table-tops, trays, and fume hoods for Army and Navy
hospitals, air bases, and even aircraft carriers. Similar products were
made for the new industrial plants which multiplied the nation's
capacity for aluminum, high octane gasoline, and synthetic rubber.
Stone tubs were shipped to the Panama Canal Zone and to San Juan.
Puerto Rico, as well as to the Quantico Marine Barracks and the
Norfolk Naval Operating Base.

The difficulties encountered by the Alberene company were typical

of the problems faced by industry in general. Of the nearly 500 employees
working in 1941, about 150 entered the armed forces and
many others left for higher-paid jobs. Government orders lifting
the minimum wage to fifty cents an hour raised operating costs, as
did another directive requiring the plant to go on a forty-eight hour
week. These increases nibbled away at the profit margin until declining
orders finally put the plant into the red in 1944. Not until
August of that year, however, did the government permit an increase
in ceiling prices and then only ten per cent. President John S.
Graves of Charlottesville said of his experience: “Too many agencies
—too much red tape—too many conflicting regulations and reports.”

To top off the company's troubles, on September 18, 1944, a flash
flood resulting from twenty inches of rainfall did over $45,000
worth of damage. Water rose ten and a half feet in the mill and over
six feet in the commissary and offices. This was ten feet higher than
it had ever before gone. Eight of the largest fills of the Nelson and
Albemarle Railroad, a company subsidiary over which it shipped, were
washed away, and service was interrupted for over two months. The
flood also damaged the tracks of both the Chesapeake and Ohio and
the Southern railways, particularly the roadbed of the latter in the
southern part of the county.[22]

Another Albemarle mineral product which enlisted for the duration
was slate. The Blue Ridge Slate Corporation was fortunate in
being able to continue all its regular peacetime products except roofing
slate. New machinery added during the war doubled its capacity
and enabled it to shorten the 168-hour week it had operated during
1941. The firm's output of slate roofing granules and flour rose from
14,000 tons in 1939 to 18,000 in 1941 and then gradually declined
to 14,500 tons in 1944. The company estimated that eighty
per cent of this production went indirectly to the War Department
and to Lend-Lease.