Granite Mountain - Texas Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

A brief history of the town which used to be located just 1 mile or so west of here, per the Texas State Historical Association's "Handbook of Texas" site:

'Granite Mountain was on the Austin and Northwestern Railroad and Farm Road 1431 three miles west of Marble Falls in southwestern Burnet County. It grew as a result of the quarries at nearby Granite Mountain. A post office called Granite was established there in 1886 with Nimrod Norton as postmaster. The post office name was changed to Granite Mountain in 1890. The Granite Mountain and Marble Falls City Railroad was chartered in October 1889 and constructed by the Austin and Northwestern Railroad Company; the new track provided easier access to the quarries by the following year. In the early 1890s Granite Mountain had a population of sixty; among the companies working in the community were the Texas Capital Granite Company, the Texas and New York Granite Company, and the Galveston Construction Company. The Granite Mountain post office was discontinued in 1911, and mail for the community was sent to Marble Falls. The number of residents was reported at twenty-five in 1933, at seventy-five in 1943, and at thirty in 1945; no population estimates were available after the 1940s."

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The marker text provides ample information of this particular quarry, but just a few interesting trivia items re: the THC Atlas annals themselves:

(1) Per the THC, this marker was placed in 1968 -- but the actual text reads "1979". One can only assume that the marker was replaced 11 years later.

(2) Also, the Atlas makes mention of 2 distinct markers -- and differing text -- for "Granite Mountain" within Marble Falls. The other one (#13357) was apparently a 1936 marker at an old pull-out / lookout point located at N 30° 33.627 W 98° 16.579, on Hwy 281 just north of La Ventana Drive. The pull-out's picnic area was removed sometime between 2010 and 2013, and the marker seems to have been removed as well since then.

Marker Number: 9717 Marker Text: 1979 This 866-foot dome of solid pink granite, covering 180 acres, contains the largest quarry of its kind in the United States. This mountain, like all granite formations, was once melted rock similar to lava. As the molten rock cooled thousands of feet below the earth's surface, it hardened into large crystals of quartz, feldspar and several dark-colored minerals. Wherever strength, durability and beauty of finish are required, granite is a favored building stone. The mountain was part of a grant made to Texas colonist William Slaughter. The site became famous commercially when a dispute arose in the 1880s over the type of stone to be used in the Capitol in Austin. The issue was settled in 1885 when Governor John Ireland resisted demands to use non-native limestone. Following this decision, a special track was built to haul the granite to the rail line in Burnet. The stone was generously donated to the state by quarry owners G. W. Lacy, N. L. Norton, and W. H. Westfall. Today granite from the quarry here is shipped to all parts of Texas, the U.S. and foreign countries for use in monuments, shafts, jetties, and buildings. It has been used in the Galveston sea wall and in new state office buildings near the Capitol in Austin.

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Date Logged Log   10/10/2020 Raven visited it