Lakeside 2008 Our Quarry Tour

About once a week here at Lakeside we hear a rumble and feel the ground moving--our cottage has a crack across the kitchen ceiling that reappears each time we repair it. We live within several miles of the Marblehead Quarry. Until Friday, however, we’d never visited our neighbor, LaFarge Marblehead Quarry, one of the largest and highest volume quarries in Ohio and on the Great Lakes. Along with about 80 other Lakesiders and visitors for Senior Venture week, we attended a lecture by a 3rd generation quarry worker on the history and production of the products on Thursday, and then boarded school buses on Friday for a fascinating tour of an amazingly high tech operation. I believe the only other time you can tour is to see the Lakeside Daisy in May. It doesn't grow (naturally) in Lakeside, but flourishes in the sand piles of the quarries in Marblehead.

“Lafarge North America acquired The Standard Slag Company, owner of the Marblehead Quarries, in 1989, and began an ambitious program to revitalize the quarry operations with an investment of $12.5 million to build the current processing plant and boat loading facility.” Before Standard Slag, it was owned by Chemstone Corporation, which acquired it from Kelleys Island Lime and Transport which had taken over several small quarries operating from the early 19th century.

Loading Lakesiders at the South Gate Parking Lot

Loading blasted rock into the crusher
View of the other side of the Crusher
Tire cost for 992Cat went from $16,000 (2007) to $30,000 (2008)

Loading the freighter; most goes to Cleveland; others to ports in MI, PA and Canada
It seems we can’t even learn about local history without some political mischief rearing its head. When I was looking up Lafarge on the internet, I found this story from WaPo in December 2007, which was featuring a series on the various candidates.

"Bill Clinton is renowned today for the millions he commands as a public speaker and business consultant. But in the early 1990s when he was making $35,000 a year as the governor of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton was the family's breadwinner, earning more than $100,000 a year from her law firm salary and corporate board fees. Lafarge, a U.S. cement maker owned by a French conglomerate, was one of her largest sources of income, paying her $31,000 a year to serve on its board. Shortly before Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Lafarge was fined $1.8 million by the Environmental Protection Agency for pollution violations at its Alabama plant. A year later, the Clinton administration reduced that fine to less than $600,000. Hillary Clinton had left the board in spring 1992 after her husband won the Democratic nomination."