A New Industry: Grindstone Quarry Near Maple Valley Begins Shipping

The latest new product of the Puget Sound country is grindstones. A carload of twelve tons of them arrived from Maple Valley Tuesday by the Columbia & Puget Sound railroad. The grindstones come from a quarry near Maple Valley, which was discovered and opened by A. H. Sherwood and is now being worked by A. A. Smith and Wells Green, of this city, under a lease from Mr. Sherwood. They are the first produced in Washington or Oregon.

The stone in question lies in a mountain about 1,000 feet above sea level, a few miles from Maple Valley. It is a pure hard sandstone in layers running from six inches to five feet six inches in thickness, at a pitch of 45 degrees and crops out for a distance of 500 yards. There is a large body of it in sight.

Mr. Sherwood has been quietly opening the quarry for about a year, and has already shipped some grindstones from it to this city without revealing whence they came. After they had been fully tested as proof of good quality, development was pushed until the quarry was well opened. It was then leased last January to Messrs. Smith & Green. They have put in a stone mill, and are producing about two tons a day, employing eighteen men. They have ordered new machinery, which will be soon here, and will enlarge the output to twenty tons a day, and increase the force to thirty or thirty-five men.

The stone is cut in the quarry in the same form as blocks two to five feet square, as in a building stone quarry. The blocks are then placed on a tram pad and run into the stone mill, where they are split into slabs the thickness of the grindstone. The corners are knocked off so as to make the roughly circular, and then they are taken to the eye-picker, a machine which picks a hole in the middle. They are next put on the turning lathe and turned into shape for the market. Then they are taken to the surfacing machine, surfaced, weighed and marked and are ready for shipment.