Local Marble Works Stakes a Claim
A local stone business proves that Stevens County granite and marble can compete with regional giants.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Boniface Gammage, proprietors of the Colville Marble Works, have just finished the cement coping for the McFarland family lot in the cemetery and have in preparation a three-ton monument of Silver Lake dark granite. The Colville Marble Works is shipping a considerable amount of work out of the county and in prices can compete with Spokane. A job was recently sent to Mayview on which bids were received from Spokane, Walla Walla, and Moscow. The local works are equipped with a polisher and gasoline engine. Marble comes from the Crystal quarry, 12 miles southwest of Colville, and granite from Silver Lake in Spokane county. Since coming here two years ago, this firm has kept practically all of the county work at home, and has been the means of showing all sections of the county the fine quality of marble to be found in Stevens county.
“Since coming here two years ago this firm has kept practically all of the county work at home.”
The pride of local manufacturing and the tension between keeping jobs in the county versus outsourcing to larger regional centers like Spokane remain a staple of rural economic development discourse.
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