Memories of the Beau Quarry Boarding House of the Chester Granite & Polishing Works Quarry By Elmer Linden

The Chester Granite & Polishing Works finishing plant was in Chester and the quarry was in Becket. The stone was hauled from the quarry to Chester in heavy duty trucks (before the rail). To simplify the problem of travel at a time when cars were scarce, the company arranged for my mother to run a boarding house near the quarry in Becket. Eighteen experienced quarrymen were hired from out of town so the boarding house was a convenient place to house them. While my mother ran the boarding house during the summer of 1922, my father worked in the quarry.

A large, long abandoned, dilapidated building with a new tar paper roof became our boarding house. The only furniture was a long table in the dining room with a bench on each side to accommodate 18 men and a box on each end to seat two more. The men slept two in a bed equipped with two pillows, a sheet and a new horse blanket with the buckles removed. Three beds were set up in the larger bedrooms with one kerosene lamp in each room. The kitchen boasted an iron cook stove and a rusty sink that drained outdoors. Water was carried from a well not far from the front door.

The quarrymen worked five and a half days a week. They earned about 30 dollars a week and board was nine dollars a week. Board consisted of a hearty breakfast of cereal, bacon and eggs and coffee, a lunch of two cold cut sandwiches on white or pumpernickel bread and a good hot supper. Coffee was available before bedtime.

That was a happy time for my sister and me. In summer, we picked blueberries for the pies and cakes my mother made. We explored abandoned farm sites, cellar holes and family cemeteries in the area. The roads to these homes had long ago vanished.

We delivered the 18 paper bag lunches to the men at the quarry about 10 a.m. but were often a few minutes late, having stopped to throw stones at the frogs in the swamp by the side of the road.

When the men saw us coming, they came to the designated place for their lunch and the derrick would swing around so lunches could be lowered to the men in the pit. Then we would make our rounds. We would take time to watch a stone being raised out of the quarry and see the driller on the bank split a stone. We’d visit the blacksmith shop and try to wheedle permission to heat an iron and pound it on the anvil, we’d go to the boiler room to look at the fire and listen to the air compressor cut in and out. At the tool shed, we’d watch a man sharpening tools. We followed the water boy who operated the gasoline pump that supplied water to the boiler. On his way back from the spring, he always brought back two pails of drinking water for the men. Delivering lunches wasn’t work, it was fun.

Three trucks made three trips from the quarry daily. The new truck was marked with “Chester Granite and Polishing Works.” The other two were chain drive, powerful but somewhat beaten up. One of these was bulldog-nosed and operated by a man who was a staunch Communist. His truck was known as “The Bolshevik.”

We had no telephone so the truck drivers would pick up groceries in Chester for my mother if she ran out of anything. We walked to our one- room school down at the top of Bonny Rigg hill but the trucks never stopped to pick us up. The grocery man delivered groceries on Mondays,Wednesdays and Fridays in the afternoon. He would give us a ride home if he happened to be going our way.

Since all of the boarders had been born in Finland (Finnish was the only language spoken at the boarding house), a rustic steam bath was warmed on Wednesday and Saturdays for them to get really clean and to challenge each other to see who could stay in the heat the longest. Hot water was obtained by running a loop of pipe from the water barrel through the fire box. Cold water for the sauna was carried from the spring to a barrel in the bathhouse.

Gambling was not allowed in the house so the men set up a large piece of cardboard for a table under a tree in the yard. Money was sometimes pooled to buy wine or bootleg alcohol from the Italian man who operated the boarding house for the Hudson Chester Granite Company. The drinking and gambling led to inevitable altercations among the men during which my mother would shut my sister and me into the family bedroom to protect us from flying objects.

Weekday evenings brought out the good side of the boarders. After supper, my 8-year-old sister would hold night school for the men. The benches in the dining room were arranged to face the wall. A piece of black building paper was tacked to the wall for a blackboard. My sister sang good evening to the men and they sang back. Then the evening class began with spelling and arithmetic. The antics of the scholars toward their young teacher left everyone laughing. Poor conduct met with a rap on the knuckles with a ruler and noisy students had to stand in the corner. It was all pleasant relaxation for the hard-working men who may have even benefited from the lessons.

NOTE: The road from Blandford to Becket, known as the Greenwoods Road, was still passable at that time either on foot or with horses. This road had been used by General Knox to haul cannon from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston to protect the city during the Revolutionary War. There were still two abandoned houses standing on this road with their lilac bushes, old fruit trees and wells. Once, the men dug a light delivery wagon out from under the caved-in roof of a barn there. My sister and I had a ride home in it with four men acting as horses. The Massachusetts Turnpike now covers the approximate route through this area as the Greenwoods Road did when we lived there.

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