Rock-Solid Mayberry Was Inspired by a Town Where Granite Is King

Visitors don’t come to Mount Airy for just “The Andy Griffith Show” ambience or the pork chop sandwiches from the Snappy Lunch. For some, the lure is the speckled white granite.

They pore over rock samples and tour the world’s largest open-face granite quarry, operated by North Carolina Granite Corp.

Mount Airy was “The Granite City” long before it became famous as Griffith’s hometown and the inspiration for the fictional Mayberry.

N.C. Granite’s rock, a gleaming white speckled with black, adorns a temple in Bangkok, the 82-story Amoco building in Chicago, Denver International Airport, Centennial Park in Atlanta, the Wright Brothers Memorial in Kill Devil Hills, N.C., and the gold depository at Fort Knox, Ky.

“If they want something really white, they’ll come to us,” said Eddie Corder, vice president of N.C. Granite.

The granite, which is impervious to salt, sand and extreme temperatures, also is used to construct street curbs in some cities, including New York and Buffalo, N.Y.

Many people who have never been to Mount Airy probably have stepped on or touched a piece of it. It’s everywhere in Washington.

“You can walk from the Kennedy Center across the [Arlington Memorial] bridge to Arlington [Va.] and never get off Mount Airy granite,” Corder said.

He spots his product in curbs and buildings whenever he travels. “In New Orleans, we passed by mausoleums. . . . It was all Mount Airy granite.”

Several Mount Airy buildings, including the post office and a bank, are made of hometown granite.

The 110-year-old quarry was the town’s first major attraction. People used to picnic on the white oyster-shaped rock where no crops would grow.

“I would hate to think we were nothing or nobody until Andy Griffith came along,” said Barbara Summerlin, interim director of the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History.

Mount Airy, a community of 7,200 just 10 miles from the Virginia line, relishes its ties to the television town of Mayberry. Visitors can stroll along Main Street and stop by Floyd’s Barbershop or the Snappy Lunch, two Mount Airy businesses mentioned on the TV show.

While the town’s connection to television is limited to black-and-white reruns, Mount Airy’s granite business continues to thrive.

The granite deposit at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountain chain is 7 miles long, 4 miles wide and 6,000 to 8,000 feet deep. Only about 5% of the deposit is being quarried.

Average Year Strips a Foot From Quarry

On a recent winter day, about five workers were hammering and drilling into the vast white rock to remove one 20-ton block--measuring 10 feet long, 5 feet high and 4 feet wide--at a time. Nothing goes to waste: Leftover pieces are crushed and sold as landscaping stone or gravel for highway shoulders.

Each day, about 40 to 50 blocks are quarried--with one raw-cut block selling for $3,000. Additional customized cutting on the same block may drive the price as high as $40,000.

In a year, when more than 11,000 blocks with a value of $33 million are removed, only an average layer of one foot is stripped away across the massive quarry.

If the quarrying continues at the present rate, the deposit should last 200 to 300 years, industry experts say.

The chalky white stone, which workers and visitors can drive across, was formed about 225 million years ago when feldspar and quartz heated and cooled slowly under pressure as the Blue Ridge Mountains developed.

Local legend has it that the granite rock first changed hands for nothing.

According to city archives, a farmer who bought land in 1872 that included the deposit realized 40 acres of it was bare rock. The seller ended up deducting the price of the “worthless rock” from the whole tract.

Builder Thomas Woodruff bought the acreage in 1889 and started a quarry business. He used the stone to build railroad stations between Greensboro and Mount Airy.

The name changed from Thomas Woodruff & Sons to North Carolina Granite Corp. in 1904. The company, which employs about 200 workers, remains privately held today by a small group of investors. Sales and earnings figures are not released.

Over the years, the company has cultivated clients in Europe, Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan, China and Australia.

It also has worked jointly for the past 50 years with the family-run Cleveland (Ohio) Marble Mosaic Co.

Last year, Cleveland Marble refurbished the previously marble Department of Labor building in Trenton, N.J., with Mount Airy granite, which costs about the same as marble but lasts longer because it’s harder.

“We used North Carolina granite, which they love and will last until they are all gone,” said Robert Zavagno Jr., a vice president at Cleveland Marble.