Ligonier Valley Rail Road Newspaper Articles
We have compiled over 1,400 newspaper articles that mention the Ligonier Valley Railroad, or related subjects. The articles were originally published starting in 1873 and our collection runs through 1995. Enjoy!
Ligonier Echo
Wednesday, April 12, 1905
Made A Trip To McCance Quarries
Saw Stones Taken From The Mountain And Made In Block And Ballast
About 225 Men At Work
Walked Up the Incline and Called on the Foreman, Frank Baker, and Looked Over the Quarries from End To End and Crawled and Walked and Slid Around Above and Down Again with the Timekeeper, B. I. Matthews, as Guide Thousands of Block and Stone And Tons of Crushed Stones for Ballast and Street Grading Come Down the Hillside Every Week A Very Hive of Industry In Converting the Mountain Rock Into Valuable Products and Consequently Wealth.
Last Friday forenoon, having to call upon Frank Baker, the foreman at the McCance stone quarries of Booth & Flinn, we went down to Baker's station on the L.V.R.R. on the early morning train where we found B. I. Matthews, formerly of Ligonier, who is timekeeper at these works, about ready to walk up the incline and we decided to make the trip also. We went up the steep grade walking on the ties. Bert said it is about 600 feet. As we neared the top we began to think it to be about 600 rods. If you think a walk up isn't hard work for an amateur at the business just go down some warm day and try it. The joy of being up and looking down into the deep hollow about 300 feet below with the silvery thread of the historic Loyalhanna coursing through and the picturesqueness of the
hills and mountains everywhere is worth the exertion. Well, we are up and on the level excavation into the mountain side where are the almost world wide famous McCance stone quarries owned and operated by Senator Flinn, of Pittsburgh. To a person who never saw anything of the sort it is worth seeing. Here are stout, robust, healthy men at work. Some are digging away the ground and getting ready to blast the hard blue rock out of the side of the hill, others are drilling the hard rocks that have been blown out of the hillside ready to be crushed into ballast or rock screenings. The power for operating the rock drills is compressed air which is furnished by an engine and machinery situated on the opposite side of the Loyalhanna and conducted through five inch pipe along above the quarries to which are connected smaller pipes as feeders to the drills. Drilling looks easy and simple enough but it no doubt takes some skill to operate the drills successfully. The stone blocks which are used for street paving purposes are about a foot long, eight inches deep and from four to six inches thick weighing from thirty-five to sixty pounds.
To make these blocks require considerable skill and is a special trade. The crusher is operated by steam with power supplied from a boiler down at the Loyalhanna and the steam conducted to the engines through pipes. It is a powerful machine and grinds the blue stone into any size desired. The rock thus crushed and the stone blocks are then sent down the steep hillside and dumped into the cars on the siding ready for shipping.
In the manufactury of this rock into marketable material considerable amount of money
is expended each month in the payment of the men employed, repairing the machinery, etc. The work at this plant is of considerable advantage to the people of this community in giving employment to men who distribute their wages in various ways among our merchants and others.
We left the quarries and walked down the winding wagon road to McCance stopping at the store of the McCance Supply Co. where we had a pleasant chat with the manager, H. W. Rhody, until the arrival of the Ligonier Valley train which brought us back to
Ligonier. It was a pleasant and interesting trip.
This article was prepared for last week's issue but owing to the publication of the auditors' statement of Ligonier borough was crowded out.