History of the Quarries
The gentlemen above are standing near what today is the base of campus. Do you recognize the outcrop in the background? These guys made barrels out of redwood fom the nearby hills. They made the barrels so that the lime could be transported down to the warf and shipped to other cities where it was needed. Men who made barrels were called coopers. Many of our last names describe a kind of work, for example, Miller, Baker, and Carpenter. Although the profession has almost disappeared today, the name remains as a reminder of this important skill.
After explosives broke huge blocks of rock from the cliffs, these quarry
workers broke the rocks into head-sized pieces using sledghammers.The
sledgehammer heads wieghed more than 25 pounds. After a week of breaking
up rock by hand,
It probably would not have been wise to challange one of these guys to a
fight on a Friday night. Most of these workers were recent immigrants
from Portugal and Italy and this was the first job they could find in
their new home. Eventually many of these folks became established in
town and some of their descendents still live here. In fact, when
walking around town, you can often see rock gardens in front of some homes.
This was, and still is, popular with those of Portugese descent.
Even in this picture, you can see the massive and structureless nature of
the rock.
Once the blocks of marble were broken by the men with the sledgehammers,
they were loaded into oxcarts and hauled down to the kilns where it would
be burned and transformed to lime.
The bikepath runs near this spot
today. You can see many boulders of marble strewn about behind the ox
team. The Ox path leads over a trestle, seen as it is today on the right,
that leads to the top of the kilns. The marble would then be dropped into
the top of the kilns to be burned and turned to lime. Note the heavy
construction used for the trestle, with large blocks of rocks used for
the foundation and whole tree trunks used for the beams and braces.
These are the kilns as they look today that were used to bake the marble
to extract the lime: CaCO3 + heat = CaO + CO2. A load of marble was baked
for two days at very high temperatures. The heat source was redwood
from the surrounding forests. Marble was dumped in from the top, leaving
just enough room for the fires at the bottom. Long pieces of firewood
were inserted through the arches along the bottom. Orignally, there were
heavy
iron doors over the arches which swung closed to keep in the heat. Several
cords of wood were used to extract
the lime from each load of marble. This is where the wood went from many of
the redwood stumps you can see on campus. Clearly, the resources needed
to make cement were plentiful near here: plenty of marble for the lime
and plenty of redwood trees for buildings and fuel for the fires. After
the fires cooled, the lime was scooped up, put into barrels, and
transported down to one of Santa Cruz' many warfs and shipped away to
other cities.
These photographs and portions of the text provided courtesy of Cynthia Mathews.
The History Museum of Santa Cruz County and the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History provide additional information.
Back to the Upper Quarry.