Another historic event took place on that first train ride from Stone Mountain to Atlanta, in 1845. The local leaders discussed organizing an agricultural society to promote better farming and merchandising methods. The first meeting of the South Central Agricultural Society was held at the mountain in 1846, with 61 charter members. The following year the Society held a fair at Stone Mountain. A Savannah reporter, covering the event for his paper, wrote: “Wagons, carriages, carts and pedestrians are arriving every minute. Ladies form a very large proportion.” The correspondent’s concluding notation, that he slept in a room with twenty-eight other people, explains why the fair was held at Stone Mountain only two seasons. It was moved to more populous Atlanta and grew into the great Southeastern Fair, while the society evolved into the Georgia Department of Agriculture.
The Civil War touched Stone Mountain to the extent that the flow of tourists stopped, and a detachment of Union cavalry swooped in and burned most of the town, sending up columns to join the smoke from Atlanta, Decatur and other unfortunate neighbors.
Stone Mountain’s granite, being too heavy for long hauls by wagon, had no commercial value whatever until the coming of the railroad. The spur line built in 1847 surely hauled rock as well as tourists. The first official mention of the granite industry appears on a deed filed in 1863, when W. B. Wood and John J. Meador sold a parcel of land, but reserved quarrying rights.
In the Reconstruction Period, when Southern industry was at its lowest ebb, the granite quarries flourished. Growing towns needed paving blocks and curb stones. Buildings destroyed in the war had to be replaced. William H. and Samuel H. Venable, as the Venable Brothers, expanded until they had acquired the entire mountain in 1887, estimating that altogether it cost them $48,000. The firm operated for seventy more years, extending the railroad line around to the east side, where the finest stone was found.
Stone Mountain granite paved principal streets in most of the Southeastern towns. At the height of their operation, the quarries were turning out 200,000 paving blocks and 2,000 feet of curbing a day. In addition, building stones went into the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, the famous Fulton Tower jail, many post offices, courthouses, warehouses, and commercial buildings, into the foundations of skyscrapers, to Panama for the canal locks; and tremendous blocks of granite were shipped to the seacoasts from Charleston to New Orleans for breakwaters.
Will T. Venable, who grew up in the house nearest the steep side of the mountain, told the writer of his boyhood there in the eighties for an article published sixty years later.
“The rarest sight is a rainbow on the mountain’s face,” Mr. Venable said. “I have seen but two or three in my lifetime. They can only appear very early in the morning, since the big rock faces to the north. The bow always starts on the ground, climbs the mountain and disappears on top. It almost makes you believe you might find a pot of gold up there.
“When it rains, the side of the mountain looks like a waterfall. The water turns into foam and literally bubbles down. When I was a youngster we used to hang our clothes on convenient limbs and stand under the falls for a foam bath. It was pleasant while you were taking it, but when you dried off, you found yourself covered with very fine, hard sand, which itched like the mischief. As you look at the side of the mountain, you see the courses taken by the water as it pours off. A close-up shows that the water has eroded little ditches two or three inches deep.
“The greatest show we ever had was the work on the carving,” Mr. Venable continued. “If you have ever stood fascinated while a steam shovel dug a hole in flat ground, maybe you can imagine how the work on the mountain kept us entertained.”
An incident odd enough to be typical of Stone Mountain’s history took place in 1928, just after air mail was inaugurated. Little single-seated biplanes gave overnight service between Atlanta and New York, at a period when night-flying instruments were few and crude, and Stone Mountain lay directly in the path of flight. At the pilots’ insistence, a contractor was commissioned to erect a safety light on top.