HISTORY FACT

 ROCK CRUSHER AND STORAGE BINS

Men smashed the refuse stone that accumulated throughout the quarry into about 20-inch chunks using 18-pound hammers.  Small railroad dump cars carried the scrap rock from blasts along with spalls (chips) from the stone and paving cutters to the stone crusher.  The stone was dumped into the oval-shaped, steel-lined crusher that was mainly underground.  There a huge revolving egg-shaped, air powered steel crusher  about six feet in diameter and 10 feet high  smashed the rock against the steel walls.  As the rock broke into smaller pieces, it fell into a deep pit under the crusher where a conveyor belt elevated the stone to the top of the storage building.  The conveyor dumped the rock according to size.  The rock fell through the screens into six huge bins (10x20x10 feet each).  The classified rock was stored in the bins.  Standard size of the crushed was two and one half inches; it weighed 2200 pounds per cubic yard.  The rubble, used for small foundations and third class railroad masonry, was graded into four sizes.  One bin held silica sand, used for mixing with concrete.  When orders for crushed rock or rubble arrived at the quarry, Fred Revier, Frank Nelson and men who worked with the rock crusher released the cover on the bottom of a bin.  The rock was funneled through small openings in the bottom of the bins, down chutes that led to railroad cars that passed through tunnel-like arches under and next to the stone crusher building.  Gravity actually did most of the work.