File:Pacific service magazine (1924) (14781378592).jpg

Identifier: pacificservicema1627paci (find matches)
Title: Pacific service magazine
Year: 1912 (1910s)
Authors: Pacific Gas and Electric Company
Subjects: Pacific Gas and Electric Company Electric utilities Electrical engineering Public utilities
Publisher: San Francisco : Pacific Gas and Electric Company
Contributing Library: San Francisco Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: San Francisco Public Library

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e hall. Soon after the Civil War a few of thehardier souls who sought a less fickle god-dess than the elusive gold formed the Co-lumbia Marble Company and opened thenow deserted quarry where the deposit out-crops in the canyon of the Stanislaus aboutthree miles north of Columbia, and startedshipping their product into San Francisco.Thus the cycle was completed over fiftyyears ago. Columbia gold, traded in retrib-utive justice for Columbia marble, embel-lished the last prospect hold of the Forty-niner in the old Cypress Lawn mausoleum. In the early days as now, transportationwas the chief problem. The first answer to the question was steam. The old HoltSteam Tractor No. 8 still stands rusting onthe hill behind the quarry after 45 years ofservice, as obsolete as the ox-cart beside theseven-speed tractor of today. Before theSierra railroad penetrated the mountains to the companys present shipping point at Jef-fersonville, the old Holt led a string ofthree broad-wheeled ten-ton cars to Oak-
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The mill of the Columbia Marble Company. Here the blocks from the quarry aresawn into slabs and stacked in the yard for shipment. Pacific Service Magazine 213 dale. Three days were required for theround trip of eighty miles. When the roadswere heavy, an auxiliary tractor was hookedonto the back end, and, furnished withsteam from the Holt up in front, formed aprimitive push and pull system. Today amotor truck hauls the same load in a day. Geology of Marble.—All this becomescontemporary history when we considerthe age of marble itself. Somewhere back inthe pre-Tut days when the Sierras werehigh points in the Pacific Ocean, a colonyof minute shell fish died and came to rest inwhat was in some distant age to be the can-yon of the Stanislaus. If they had exerciseda little more foresight and located theirgraveyard on a railroad siding they wouldhave been much more valuable to posterity,for posterity has not, as yet, brought therailroad to the mountain. During the age-long years when the g

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