The recent sale of Swenson Granite Co. ends four generations of family ownership of the state’s last locally owned granite quarry, but things could have been a lot worse. Four decades ago, they almost were.
“We were in very serious trouble. It was a disaster,” said Kurt Swenson, 71, who with his brother, Kevin, was the last descendant of founder John Swenson still working at the iconic Concord firm when it was sold to a Canadian firm last week.
“Things were in very bad shape,” agreed Kevin, 66.
In the early 1970s cheaper granite production in Italy was hurting Swenson Granite’s “building stone” business, in which 10- or 20-ton granite blocks are cut, shaped and polished for installation in places like the CBS building in New York or, more recently, fancy hotels in the Middle East. This is the high-end part of the stone-mining industry, the part that gets played up in company brochures, and it had long been at the center of Swenson’s business plan. But times had changed.
“In the 1960s, Swenson Granite was doing quite well – we had some high-profile projects. But it was not profitable and it got less and less and less profitable every year,” Kurt Swenson said during a recent interview looking back over the company history.
By 1972, he said, the firm was almost out of money. Kurt Swenson was a lawyer in Manchester at the time, but the board of directors called him back to help his cousin, Malcolm Swenson, who was in charge, make a very hard decision. The Dec. 8, 1973, Monitor headline stated dryly “Swenson to Quit Fabrication of Building Granite,” but there was nothing dry about it.
“My first day I came to work, I went down to the production plant and told them that we were no longer producing. We closed that plant, put 200 people out of a job. People with years of experience,” he recalled. “It was horrible. . . . We paid them every nickel they were due, but unlike this sale, we didn’t have money (for pensions).”
The company shut the New York City office, laid off some other people, and faced a future that depended on selling stone for curbs, at the time perhaps 10 percent of overall business.
“I said I will never, ever allow the company to get in a position where this can happen again,” Kurt Swenson said.
And despite ups and downs over the years, including a disastrous foray into the public stock market after buying Vermont’s Rock of Ages that ended up in lawsuits, Swenson Granite has grown and thrived. It was lack of Swenson family succession, not lack of business success, which led to last week’s purchase of Swenson and Rock of Ages by Canadian investment firm TorQuest Partners, which also bought Quebec’s Polycor and joined the three to create an industry giant.
Polycor will take over Concord operations, and says the Swenson name will remain and there will be no layoffs or management changes aside from the Swenson brothers’ retirement. In fact, the company plans to expand production and stores.
Granite is an igneous rock, created when molten magma cools underground in specific conditions. Its color, strength and other characteristics depend on nearby minerals and the specifics of this cooling, which vary from location to location. That’s why the granite in Bethel, Vt., is world famous for its white hue, why North Carolina is known for its pink granite, and why Rattlesnake Hill is full of what is known as Concord Gray.
People have been digging up Concord Gray stone since before the Civil War, and by the turn of the 20th century there were 44 different operators quarrying stone in west Concord, according to the Concord Historical Society’s history of the city. One of them was John Swenson, who had moved to the U.S. from his native Sweden in the 19th century and stumbled into the granite-quarrying business. He bought out many of the smaller operators until Swenson Granite Works stood alone.
Incidentally, despite our state nickname New Hampshire doesn’t have all that much granite – Mount Washington and its neighboring peaks in the Presidential Range have none at all – and has never been a major player in the global industry. It was the business success of Swenson and a few other quarries in the state during a turn-of-the-century building boom in the Northeast that gave New Hampshire a reputation for producing granite, indelibly attaching it to our image.
The Great Depression crippled the industry as did changes in building technology, and granite quarrying never regained its prominence in the state. But Swenson Granite Works remained a huge force in west Concord.
“Over the years I’ve met quite a few people, particularly in the Concord area, who say ‘my great-grandfather worked there, my grandfather worked there,’ ” said Kevin Swenson. “It was always part of the community.”
After World War II the business was run by three sons of John Swenson: John Arthur, Guy and Omar, all living in west Concord.
“The three brothers were all within walking distance of each other. Uncle Guy had the most kids, five kids, so he had the biggest house,” said Kurt Swenson. (He and Kevin are grandsons of John Arthur and sons of Kneeland “Buddy” Swenson.) “We were in and out of each other’s houses.”
Kurt, who went to Mount Herman School in Northfield, and Kevin, who attended Concord High School, were also in and out of the many small quarries on Rattlesnake Hill, which filled up with groundwater when they were no longer being used – although perhaps not as often as you’d think.
“We’d sneak up every once in a while to go swimming. Lots of people did,” said Kevin Swenson. “One swimming hole that was readily accessible, a lot of kids went there. Over time it got filled in.”
“We used to come up with my father and shoot .22s into the quarry, the water holes back there,” recalled Kurt Swenson.
Both brothers started working in the quarry when they hit their mid-teenage years when the technology of quarrying and preparing granite was much rougher than today.
“Back then it was essentially all done with jackhammers, feathers and wedges. You’d drill a hole, put in feathers and wedges, split the stone,” said Kurt, using the term “feather” for a type of shim placed alongside wedges to help expand cracks. “I had an airhammer that bounced up and down that you held along the line – or tried to. In the meantime, hot granite chips are flying up into your face. I remember (thinking) there has got to be a better way.”
These days, there is: Stone is largely cut with diamond-tipped saws, which are less arduous and also much quieter.
For his part, Kevin Swenson recalled “shoveling burner dust into grout boxes,” which involved cleaning up chips and dust spewed out when liquid-oxygen torches were used to burn channels in preparation for removing a granite block from the wall.
“One day I filled four grout boxes and one of the guys working with me said, ‘I think you’re crazy.’ But he smiled as he said it, so I guess it was a compliment,” he recalled.
Both went off to college and left the deep quarry, with Kurt becoming a lawyer and Kevin eventually returning to work in the front office.
Meanwhile, a problem typical of family businesses happened. As older generations died off, private shares were handed down and ownership became diluted among more cousins until “you don’t have anyone who’s overseeing it,” said Kevin Swenson.
Kurt Swenson agreed, in more colorful language: “There was nobody to say ‘You’re really screwing this up,’ until it hit bottom.”
Once the two brothers stepped in in 1973, things slowly turned around, based on the dull but dependable business of curbing, although it took a while; in 1980, the firm even declared bankruptcy.
The first big step came in 1984 when struggling Rock of Ages in Barre, Vt., came on the market. Although that granite quarrying firm was much larger – “they were doing $20 million in sales, we were doing $2 million in sales,” Kurt Swenson said – Swenson put together financing and bought it. Since Rock of Ages’ main business was in memorials, it gave them a new market.
“We were much better quarries than they were. We were able to change methods, cut down the number of people. It worked out exceedingly well for us,” said Kurt Swenson.
The other major step came around 1980, when Swenson turned an underused building on North State Street into its first retail store.
“It was a total failure. What we did was put all the crap granite down there and expected people would buy it. We were just trying to get rid of waste material,” admitted Kurt Swenson. But the company learned from its mistake and the retail business has become a major driver of success, to the point that in 1997 it bought the AFCO production facility in Barre to create enough granite steps, benches, signs and other landscape material to meet demand. Swenson has seven stores in four states and Polycor says it wants to open many more.
One other major company event came in 1997 when it took Rock of Ages public at the height of the IPO boom, and turned it into a “vertically integrated” company from initial quarrying through to home sales. Turns out, that didn’t work in the monument business, and a decade later Swenson brought it back as a private venture, although not before lots of turmoil and lawsuits.
These days, things are going well for Swenson and Rock of Ages. Sales figures aren’t released but Kurt Swenson said that for the two firms combined, they were in the “80 to 90 million dollar range.” And whereas in the old feather-and-wedges day the pit was happy to cut 30,000 cubic feet a year, it now cuts up to 500,000 cubic feet a year with no sign of the seam running out. In fact, boring indicates that good granite goes down half a mile – far deeper than it will ever be economically feasible to mine – and extends throughout Rattlesnake Hill.
Right now Swenson Granite Works is undergoing its biggest expansion in many decades, as machines dig into the north side of Rattlesnake Hill north to expose more granite and, more importantly, to change the way granite is quarried.
Right now, stone is cut from the walls and bottom of the massive pit, some 350 feet deep and roughly 6 acres at the top, and the blocks then are lifted out by huge derricks. The expansion, however, is designed to be a drive-in quarry, where trucks can head straight onto the floor and be loaded where the stone is cut, which is cheaper, faster and safer than lifting out 20-ton blocks with cranes.
The expansion should eventually connect with the deep pit, turning the entire operation into a more efficient drive-in quarry. It seems like the operation and its jobs are secure.
Then why did the Swenson brothers, and the board of directors, sell? Because they feared a repeat of four decades ago.
“Both brothers, we have two kids, but none of them want to run (the business). We thought about trusts, went through all kind of things to figure out what to do to keep it (in the family), finally concluded the smartest thing to do was explore all the options,” said Kurt Swenson. The company had long had a financial relationship with Polycor, so joining forces was relatively easy once the numbers were nailed down. The sale price has not been disclosed.
Although the decision was bittersweet, with some tears being shed, four generations is pretty good. Certainly no other family-owned granite firm in New Hampshire, and there were several of them, lasted nearly as long.
“I’m just proud that we were able to carry on for the fourth generation – 133 years. The fact that we were able to maintain John Swenson’s reputation for integrity and fair dealing with customers, and even more so with employees, that was a great legacy,” said Kevin Swenson.
An unusual bit of that legacy can be seen at Blossom Hill Cemetery, not too far south of the quarry. As Kevin Swenson tells it, during a trip in the summer to Falkenberg, Sweden, where the original John Swenson was born and raised, he found an outcropping of granite on the old family farm. He left a piece of granite he had brought from Concord, and carried home a piece of Swedish granite that he placed by John Swenson’s grave site.
“In a way you could say the stone cycle has been completed,” he said.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313 or dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
