After 133 years being owned by a local family, Swenson Granite Works of Concord has been sold to a Quebec stone-industry giant, leaving New Hampshire with no home-grown companies cutting the stone that gave the state its nickname.
Swenson announced Friday that it had been purchased by Polycor, which calls itself the largest marble and granite producer in North America. The company has grown aggressively through acquisitions since its creation in 1987. No layoffs or cutbacks in operations are planned.
Kurt Swenson, chairman of the board and great-grandson of the company founder, said the sale was prompted by a situation common in family-owned businesses: A lack of successor.
“There’s nobody in the family who wants to be in line who could take over the company,” he said Friday. “After spending a lot of time with layers and tax experts about setting up a trust, everything was so complicated, we decided we needed to go ahead and explore the options available in the sale of the company.”
The actual sale, he said, was prompted by TorQuest Partners, a private equity firm in Toronto that in essence bought Polycor, giving it the financial heft to buy Swenson Granite and its partner Rock of Ages.
“There was tremendous mixed emotions about this,” Swenson said, describing emotional meetings with employees Friday. Among other things, the company is paying $500 for each year of service to the roughly 120 employees of Sewnson’s quarry and retail operations, plus about 280 more who work for Rock of Ages and Sewnson operations in three other states.
Patrick Perus, CEO of Polycor, said Friday that the company appreciated the Concord firm’s efficiency in mining the strain of granite know as Concord Gray and turning it into curbing in a factory atop Rattlesnake Hill, and also for Swenson’s building and seven operating retail stores.
“This is a new factor for us. We are a quarry owner; we didn’t have any retail division,” Perus said. “We want to keep retail and we want to grow it.”
Scott Herrick, executive vice president of Swenson Granite, emphasized Friday that “throughout the company, we’re in the growth mode.”
“We’re going to need more people, not less,” he said.
Perus of Polycor said the Swenson name will remain. In fact, he said, Polycor will rename the operation it bought last year in Jay, Maine, to Swenson Maine.
“The name Swenson has a lot of brand equity,” he said.
The major change is that the Swenson company headquarters, long located at 369 N. State St., will move to the Quebec City, where Polycor is based.
The sale price was not disclosed. Polycor is privately held, as is Swenson.
Now that it has bought Swenson, Polycor has about 800 employees, Perus said, half in Canada and half in the United States.
Polycor owns 30 quarries and 12 factories in the two countries. Perus said the firm aims for $150 million in total sales in the coming year.
Polycor’s purchase in 2015 of a large but closed granite quarry in Jay, Maine, spurred Swenson to begin expanding its quarry on Rattlesnake Hill to better compete in its core market of granite curbing in the Northeast.
The Rattlesnake Hill quarry – a six-acre hole that extends 300 feet deep, where 20-ton blocks are sliced up by diamond wire saws and lifted to the surface by huge cranes – is by far the largest granite-cutting operation in New Hampshire.
It was the last quarry in the state still with New Hampshire owners. A small quarry in Milford is owned by Massachusetts-based Fletcher Granite Co., while a locally owned quarry in Fitzwilliam is selling stone that was previously cut and is not doing new mining at this time.
From Rattlesnake Hill comes what is known internationally as Concord Gray, a fine-grained gray stone that to many people defines what cut granite is supposed to look like.
Last winter Swenson began cutting further into the hillside, in an operation visible from I-93 between exits 15 and 16, to create an expasion that will operate as a drive-in quarry. Trucks drive straight into such quarries to carry out blocks, reducing time and cost as compared to deep quarries, from which blocks must be lifted by cranes.
Swenson has a factory atop Rattlesnake Hill where blocks are cut into curbing before being shipped out.
Perus said such a factory next to the quarry was part of the appeal of Swenson Granite Works.
“This is a jewel in the industry. Their reputation is perfect, their expertise, their efficiency,” he said.
Swenson Granite Works dates to 1883, when Swedish-born John Swenson consolidated a number of small granite operations on Rattlesnake Hill in north Concord. A number of old quarries can still be found throughout the woods, as generations of daredevil Concord teenagers can attest.
Swenson survived the industry collapse during the Great Depression and afterwards, says the company history, realized that the arrival of the Interstate highway system meant road curbing was its future. It left the building stone business in the 1970s and has been almost entirely focused on curbing since.
Kurt and Kevin Swenson are great-grandchildren of John. Kurt’s son, Jake, sits on the board of directors, but was not interested in taking over ownership.
The privately held firm does not disclose sales figures but was estimating it would get around 42,000 tons of stone from Concord this year, equaling sales of between $10 million and $15 million.
The stone mining industry has been consolidating for years, as international competition has grown and the cost-cutting advantage from size has increased.
Swenson has been doing its own consolidation; in 1984 it merged with Rock of Ages, whose huge quarry in Barre, Vt., is well known because of its tourist viewing platform, and in 1997, the Swenson Co. purchased the Anderson-Friberg production facility, also in Barre.
Swenson owns two quarries in Quebec that cut pink and gray granite; two quarries in North Carolina that cut pink and white granite; several quarries in Barre, that produce high-quality gray granite, one in Bethel, Vt., that produces white granite, a black granite quarry in Pennsylvania and a gray granite quarry in Woodbury, Vt.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313, or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
