Summary: Set in Vermont’s granite country in 1910, narrates a rivalry between two granite companies representing old and new ways, with a young newspaperman with social aspirations caught in between.

Dan Strickland is a stonecutter’s son. His father died of white lung disease, breathing in granite dust as he worked in George Rutherford’s granite shops. He has higher aspirations and goes to work at the Granite Junction Gazette, helping with various tasks given him by Slayton, the editor who hopes his weekly editorials will open the way to higher positions with a big city newspaper. Meanwhile Dan begins working as a reporter, whose “Local Lumps” column rapidly becomes the town’s favorite part of the newspaper.

Rutherford Granite is the biggest employer in town. Capitalized by out-of-town investors, they dominate the granite business in this Vermont town, and thus enjoy the favor of the newspaper and the town fathers. The rival is Wheeler Granite, a smaller and older company. Rutherford is a union shop. Wheeler builds personal loyalty and pays well for quality work. Rutherford goes big, with government building contracts in big cities. Wheeler does a smaller but steady business. George Rutherford loves new ways, new machines and methods. Wheeler sticks to the tried and true. Rutherford tries to win Wheeler over, attempting to persuade him to take some smaller jobs. Wheeler refuses.

They clash. Rutherford dumps waste on Wheeler’s property. Rutherford takes over the railroad and charges his competitors more than his own company. This is at the behest of his investors who want more profit. It costs his bookkeeper his integrity. Wheeler challenges him repeatedly in court and wins, but has a tough time with the enforcement of any judgments. George Rutherford would like to get along but his wife Alice is another story. She is determined that the business will succeed and that the Rutherfords will dominate society, even if it means cutting Wheeler’s wife out of the social scene.

Just when Rutherford Granite seems to have the upper hand a series of deadly accidents occur. Rutherford enlists Dan to investigate, suspecting anarchist activity, which has occurred in other towns. Both Dan’s investigative efforts and his social and romantic ambitions expose him to the various strata of Granite Junction society, from the West End where workers live, and where liquor can be bought in the dry town and sensual pleasures satisfied, to the shops on Main Street, where many of the Gazette’s advertising money comes from, and the upper class homes (and girls) on High Street. Others like to use Dan as well, like the winsome Perley Prescott, always working a new business scheme, who uses Dan to procure liquor. Then there is Bob Blackstone, Wheeler’s foreman who resents the favoring of the Rutherford enterprises by the newspaper and Dan’s investigations into the “accidents” at Rutherford’s business. Resentments turn to threats.

Dan discovers how hard it is to rise beyond one’s roots in such a stratified society. As a reporter, will he truly report “without fear or favor?” Will he pursue prestige or power, or listen to Lieutenant Ridgeway who sees a different future in this young man? And beyond these personal matters, how will the increasingly deadly rivalry resolve and what will that mean for Granite Junction and its workers?

First-time author Eric Pope combines a page turning plot with a sociological study of a town in the heart of the granite mining industry. He draws upon his experience editing a northern Vermont paper for ten years while researching the town’s history, the basis for this novel. Like real life, there are characters we love and root for, ones we admire, ones we hate, and a number in between, all the types that make up a town like Granite Junction–and maybe our town as well.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program. ( )

Granite Kingdom, a debut novel by Eric Pope, is a look at a northern Vermont village in 1910. The quarrying and finishing of granite is the major employer in the village resulting in people overlooking many of it's flaws. Bullies and sabotage ensue, while outside influences are working behind the scenes. Dan Strickland is the best character, influenced by, but not a part of the business. His attempt at making a success of himself is a main theme.
The book certainly makes one appreciate the work involved when you see a granite courthouse, monument or other structure.
The author tries to gently include as much about local history and the granite industry as possible, perhaps overwhelming the casual reader.

My thanks to LibraryThing and Rootstock Publishing for an ARC. ( )

Barely thirty state legislatures have knuckled down to the hard task of designating an official state rock. Vermont, though, was downright promiscuous with the honor, bestowing it on slate, marble and granite, apparently after heated lobbying in 1991.

It is the latter igneous rock that author Eric Pope is concerned with in his historical novel, Granite Kingdom (Rootstock Publishing, $18.99), one that threads its way throughout the Green Mountain state and has been commercially mined there for well over a century. Barre—the self-named “Granite Center of the World”—is the best-known quarry site in the state and home to the Vermont Granite Museum.

But granite was (and still is) mined at various locations, and for a quarter of a century, roughly through the first World War, the town of Hardwick was the king of the granite hill in terms of stone used in construction, rather than memorial projects.

The town was the site of the finishing sheds for the granite actually being mined from nearby Woodbury. Hence the Woodbury Granite Company, which began in October, 1868—the same year the railroad came to Hardwick—and grew slowly but surely until it struck pay dirt, so to speak, in 1903. That year it won a contract bid for the Pennsylvania State Capitol, then the largest such granite contract ever.

The deal called for 400,000 cubic feet of granite to be quarried, cut, delivered, and set into place within two years, a feat few regarded possible to fulfill. Yet it did, and within two years at that. That opened the floodgates. Along with Pennsylvania, Iowa, Kentucky and Wisconsin used Woodbury Granite for their state capitol buildings.

According to Elizabeth Dow of the Hardwick Historical Society, the company thereafter went on a contract signing spree: In 1912 alone, she wrote, “... the company signed 117 contracts—one every three days—involving 32 office buildings, 19 mausoleums, 14 banks and post offices, five railroad stations, three schools and theaters, two Masonic temples, 234 residences, hotels, courthouses, public memorials, and one government building, garage, hospital, and church.”

Woodbury Granite, then led by George Bickford, may have been top dog in Hardwick, but it was hardly alone; by 1910 there were 13 operating granite companies, with Ernest Fletcher’s eponymous firm the second-largest.

Pope’s novel begins in 1910 and, while fiction, barely strays from the history. Here Hardwick becomes Granite Junction. Bickford seems to resemble George Rutherford, running the Sterling Granite Company. Fletcher’s presumed substitute is Ernest Wheeler, of the Wheeler Granite Company.

Dan Strickland, a young reporter for the Granite Junction Gazette, and the main protagonist of the story, could be a stand-in for a younger Eric Pope, except that Dan is a bachelor, and Pope was married more than 40 years ago when he and his wife, Karen, took over the reins of the Hardwick Gazette.

Part of Pope’s weekly routine for the paper was to dig out items from the archives and write about the town’s past. Hence his inspiration, albeit he now lives in Michigan and waited to take up the story until retiring from his last post, doing public relations for the Lawrence Technological University near Detroit.

He clearly knows his way around a keyboard, and there’s no questioning the authenticity of the setting and the depictions of the intricacies of the granite trade shortly after the turn of the 20th century. Aside from the sheer physical dangers of the granite mining, there was also the threat of white lung disease, silicosis, the disease which has done in Dan’s father, a stonecutter.

Through the use of multiple points-of-view from the story’s numerous characters we get a sense of the societal striations at work in a community of immigrant workers, supporting tradesmen and women (including fallen ones) and the more social elite.

The crux of the plot is a tug-of-war between Wheeler and Rutherford, Wheeler under the impression that he is being short-changed in business because of Rutherford’s influence in the town and favoritism from the Gazette’s editor.

Unbeknownst to Wheeler his foreman decides to take matters into his own hands and arranges instances of sabotage against Rutherford’s operation, resulting in several deaths. The foreman isn’t Pope’s strongest bit of characterization, almost a cartoon villain, complete with the name Blackstone. He might as well be cackling while twirling his handlebar mustache.

Dan suspects Blackstone may be behind the fatalities at the quarries, and as time rolls on he hones his reporting skills, bringing him closer to cracking the case.

There’s a wryly comic subplot about Dan’s romantic entanglements, themselves comments on social strata. Should he pursue Molly O’Brien, who helps his mother with chores three days a week? Or were his visits to Rosa Rosetti, the beauteous Italian widow whose husband was killed due to Blackstone’s skulduggery, about to turn into something more? Maybe his keeping company with the classy Camille Upton could elevate him into the ranks of the town’s elite? Or would he simply marry the Gazette, if its frustrated editor ever lets go of the reins?

There’s a satisfying denouement to the story. Time was perhaps less kind to Hardwick, when the taste for Beaux-Art architecture began to fade after World War I, and therefore quarry work as well. The once-agricultural town turned industrial suffered economic woes in the ensuing decades.

Hardwick gradually regained agricultural equilibrium. If now all-digital, the Hardwick Gazette, founded in 1889, is still going. And the Woodbury quarry, inactive since the 1930’s, was purchased in the early 1950’s by Swenson Granite Works of New Hampshire, on the hunch that Pennsylvania was going to want to spiff up its capitol edifice. The hunch paid off in 1967, and the Woodbury quarry has been producing steadily ever since.

[A version of this review, with illustration, is at http://theaposition.com/tombedell/golf/lifestyle/9176/rocking-around-the-blocks]

The story had a slow start. I had a hard time becoming interested in the novel and stopped and started several times before continuing with the story. As a whole, though, the book was a slow read. There was alot of description of the book's many characters with the exception of the characters in the newspaper business. The scenes with them were fast paced. Why the difference? Perhaps because the author is a retired journalist. In addition, there was too much narrative. If the backstory was given via dialogue the book would have been faster paced. The setting was interesting. I have never read about a community that worked in the granite industry and the setting helped to inform as well as entertain. The author certainly knows his subject well. It is a good thing when historical fiction readers get a setting different from the usual England, France and Italy, particularly when the setting is an industry. There is also a sense of history to the novel. During the celebration of the 45th anniversary to the end of the Civil War, celebrated in the 3 days before July 4, Dan interviews an old soldier about his experience fighting in the Battle of Gettysburg. The soldier discusses the movements of his regiment in a parlor "unchanged since Lincoln died." I liked the novel but have to emphasize that the amount of narrative slowed down my reading. ( )

Historical fiction account regarding a town with competing granite businesses, the local newspaper, and the characters within. ( )