The Hardwick and Woodbury Railroad (H&WRR, or H&W) was a short-line railroad serving the towns of Hardwick and Woodbury, Vermont. Built to serve the local granite industry by bringing rough stone from the quarries to the cutting-houses, the railroad was about long, plus leased track, extended to about at its greatest extent. It connected with only one other railroad, the St. Johnsbury & Lake Champlain, in Hardwick.
The business arc of the Hardwick & Woodbury was typical of most short line, single-industry railroads. Built as an industrial road in 1895–1897, the line never grew beyond the granite industry, and its fortunes largely followed those of the Woodbury Granite Company, its principal customer and plurality shareholder. With the slump in demand for architectural granite, and especially large stones, caused by changes in building construction techniques and then the Great Depression, the railroad ceased operations and abandoned its track in 1934. The rails were removed in 1940, and little trace remains of the railroad today.
Background
The Green Mountains of Vermont have long been known for the quantity and quality of their granite and marble, but the weight of the stone combined with difficulty of carving granite largely prevented the development of a stone-cutting industry in northern Vermont until some marble quarries opened in the Hardwick area in the middle of the 19th century.John S. Kendall, "The Hardwick & Woodbury Railroad", The Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, No. 68 (November, 1946), pp. 50-56; The Railway & Locomotive Historical Society. The first "finishing shed," where the rough-hewn stone was cut, shaped and polished, was built in Hardwick in 1870. Granite quarries opened on Robeson Mountain in nearby Woodbury, Vermont’s largest deposit of building granite, in the 1870s but transportation limitations prevented much development of the industry.Federal Writers Project, Vermont; a guide to the Green Mountain state, Vermont State Planning Board, 1937, p. 233.John Barnhill, "Rail to the granite mountain", Trainboard, Feb 9, 2008; accessed 2020-11-04.
The construction of the Portland and Ogdensburg Railway to Hardwick in 1872 (it later became the St. Johnsbury and Lake Champlain Railroad) enabled the shipping of quantities of northern Vermont stone to the outer worldMarvin R. Kendall and Donald B. Valentine, Jr., "Rough Granite, Tough Shays: The History of the Hardwick & Woodbury R.R.", The New England States Limited, Vol. 1, No. 3, Winter 1977-78, New England Rail Service. and facilitated the growth of the local granite industry.Elizabeth H. Dow, "Hardwick on the Map, 1895-1915: Industrialization in Direct Democracy", Vermont History: Proceedings of the Vermont Historical Society, Vol. 58, No. 4, pp. 221-249 (Fall 1990). Though it had limited granite of its own, Hardwick became a granite-cutting center hosting a dozen sheds finishing granite by 1890.Paul Wood, "Rail to the Granite Mountain, Part 1: The Hardwick & Woodbury Railroad", The Hazen Road Dispatch, Vol. 43, pp. 1-11, Greensboro (Vt.) Historical Society, Summer 2019. Rough-cut granite was brought from the quarries to and through the town in heavy horse-drawn wagons, which caused congestion and damaged roads and bridges. In 1892, after pressure from both civic leaders and quarry owners, the railroad built the Hardwick Branch, also known as the Quarry Railroad, a spur from Granite Junction near the western edge of Hardwick village to Buffalo Crossing by the southern fringe of the village. This eliminated granite-carrying wagons from the village’s central streets. Over time, it also concentrated the granite industry in five clusters along the Hardwick Branch at Lower Wolcott St., at West End, at Woodbury Granite Co., at E.R. Fletcher Granite Co., and at Buffalo Crossing.
Largely as a result of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, granite became a very popular building material for commercial and government buildings.Paul Heller, "History Space: Hardwick granite built a nation", The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press, April 7, 2018. While the finer-grained granite of Barre was preferred for monuments and gravestones, the coarser-grained Woodbury stone found a market in "architectural" uses such as buildings and paving. As demand grew, the granite-finishing operations in Hardwick began to look farther afield for sources of the raw stone. While some quarries had been opened in nearby Woodbury, transportation of the stone to the finishing sheds was problematic: it was slow and difficult, and caused significant damage to the roads. The limitations of horse-drawn wagons would prevent much further growth in the local industry. Ordinarily, a horse was needed for every ton of granite hauled by wagon. It once took an 18-horse team three days to move a large column of rough granite from the quarry to Hardwick (a distance of or more, depending on the route), after which 20 road culverts needed to be rebuilt. Such a team might be followed by a one-horse wagon loaded with axes, shovels, peavies, and other tools to repair the damage.George F. Bickford, "Remembering the Granite Quarries in Woodbury", Hardwick Gazette, September 30, 1980, p. 6. Transportation was somewhat easier in the winter, as the frozen ground would not give way, and snow allowed the use of sleds, which encountered less friction.
The incorporation of the Village of Hardwick in 1891Elizabeth Dow, "Why the Village of Hardwick in 1891? Why the Merger in 1988?" The Hazen Road Dispatch, Vol. 13, pp. 4-7; Greensboro (Vt.) Historical Society, Summer 1988. and the new government’s interest in improving the community’s infrastructure, including its streets, intensified the interest in an alternative means of transportation for the granite. Meanwhile, the Village’s establishment of piped water, a fire department, and an electric department allowed for further growth of industry. The opening of a rail link to the competing Barre quarries raised the spectre of the local industry’s being out-competed. The St.J.&L.C. was asked to extend the Hardwick Branch to the quarries in Woodbury but, already in a weak financial condition and facing unfavorable economic conditions, declined.
Incorporation and construction
Faced with lack of interest from other quarters, the quarry owners decided to build their own railroad. The Hardwick and Woodbury Railroad Company was chartered ("for the purpose, and with the right, of building a railroad... from some point on the St. Johnsbury & Lake Champlain R.R. in the town of Hardwick to the mountain quarry of the Woodbury Granite Company in the town of Woodbury" ) by an act of the state legislature November 23, 1894, with the stipulation that construction must begin within two years, and be completed in five.1894 Vt. Acts & Resolves 235: An Act to Incorporate the Hardwick and Woodbury Railroad Company, Nov. 23, 1894; Laws of Vermont, A.D. 1894, pp. 316-319. Burlington: The Free Press Association.Act 235, Sec. 9 The company’s charter permitted the railroad to cease operations from December through March, although this did not happen.Act 231, Sec. 1.Rob Peters, "The Hardwick & Woodbury Railroad", The Nelson & Albemarle Railway, August 2019. The corporation’s initial capital was set at $50,000, with an option to increase the amount "if necessary."Act 235, Sec. 2. The larger local granite companies and many of their officers bought stock, as did a number of townspeople. By 1902, the Fletcher Granite Co. owned one-third of the railroad’s stock.Paul Wood, "Carving His Place as a Granite Pioneer" The Barre Montpelier Times Argus, Jan. 7, 2013. The new company held its first regular meeting in March 1895.
As the St. Johnsbury & Lake Champlain Railroad had already built the Hardwick Branch track to serve the granite sheds on the west side of Hardwick, construction of the new railroad began at the end of that spur, which was leased from the St.J.&L.C. for one dollar per year. The St.J.&L.C. also provided 56-pound (per yard, or 27.8 kg/m) rails, spikes, and ties for the new company to begin construction of its main line. The H&W rented some flat cars and a locomotive—a 4-4-0 Hinckley—from another regional railroad, the Boston & Maine, which was affiliated with the St.J.&L.C. A wooden derrick and rail header (track-laying crane) were built on one of the rented flat cars. This arrangement allowed two rails to be laid every nine minutes.
The route was surveyed in the summer of 1895. As local labor was used as much as possible, the actual work of grading the roadbed was delayed until the haying season was over. Much of the roadbed was cut from the sides of the hills, and grading was done with hand tools, wheelbarrows, and horse-drawn carts. Five miles of roadbed were graded in 1895, and the remainder was graded in the summer of 1896. Grading work came to a halt when the ground froze, and the first rails were laid thereafter. Wooden trestles were built to span gorges along the right of way. In a process that continued until 1904, the trestles were subsequently replaced with "grout" or waste stone, which was used to fill the ravines. The fill was "fine" grout from the cutting sheds, as large blocks falling could have destroyed the trestle structures. The largest—and last filled—of the gorges took 6,600 carloads of grout.
Varnum & Gilfillan, a St. Johnsbury-based contracting concern, was hired for culvert construction and trestle filling. This company brought Italian immigrant labor from Boston, preferring this source to the local farmers who also had farms to tend. A number of them stayed and worked in the granite finishing shops, becoming pillars of the community.
Five miles of new track was constructed to a point known as Burnham Hill in Woodbury by 1896. By then, the rented B&M engine had reached the limit of its usefulness, and money ran short. Work wound down until the new owners of the Woodbury Granite Company (John S. Holden and Charles W. Leonard) bought enough stock in the railroad to become its principal (although not majority) shareholders and a Lima Locomotive Works Shay, bought from the Barre & Chelsea Railroad, arrived in mid-1897. The new locomotive was in poor condition, requiring some re-working to get it serviceable. It was given the number 1 and renamed "E. H. Blossom" in honor of the H&W’s General Manager.
The last few miles of track were difficult to build as they ascended Robeson Mountain to the quarries through the series of switchbacks and tight turns, that kept the grade of the track below a maximum of 7%. The average grade of the last two miles was 5%. The end of the line, at the Fletcher quarry, rose , about above the railroad’s origin in Hardwick.
Construction of the main line was completed to the Woodbury quarry around October 1, 1897. The total cost of construction was reported to be $50,691.69 (). There were of track in total (counting the leased span), only 9 of which could be called main line. Originally, there was no way to turn around a locomotive on the entire line: a crew would need to travel over the St.J.&L.C. track to Morrisville to use the turntable there. A wye was built at Foster’s Summit, and later another wye was installed near the H&W engine house in Hardwick. The main line passed thirteen listed "stations" functioning as waypoints for calculating shipping costs but not a single company-owned building on the entire route. Despite the railroad’s name, the track did not extend to Woodbury village.Robert C. Jones, Railroads of Vermont, Volume 1, The New England Press, Shelburne, Vt., 1993; pp. 326-339.