Photo courtesy Texas Quarries
Photo courtesy Texas Quarries
Photo by Stephen Burnett
Photo by Stephen BurnettCompanies on Anderson Mill Road have spent decades removing limestone and crushed rock from beneath Cedar Park.
Quarrying at the site began in April 1929 when W. H. Johnson started researching Texas limestone and founded Texas Quarries. The company unearthed large cubes of the ancient rock and shipped them to Austin to be cut at a mill that ran on a new power source—electricity—provided by the Texas Power & Light Company.
In 1959, M.E. Ruby Jr. Inc. founded another quarrying operation on Anderson Mill Road. At first workers dug blocks of stone to be used for highway construction, said Mark McKenzie, president of Ranger Excavating, which bought the company in 1996.
Today the company still sells crushed limestone that workers blast out of the quarry on its 200-acre parcel of land south of the Texas Quarries site, McKenzie said. For its blasting operations the company uses less powerful charges than it has in the past, he said. Before 1996, the blasting schedule was unpredictable, but it is now performed at about 10 a.m. or 2 p.m. on weekdays. Federal guidelines and a city permit govern M.E. Ruby's blasting procedures, McKenzie said.
Texas Quarries had exhausted its original quarry's supply of limestone by the 1960s and closed the quarry. In the 2000s the company filled in the canyon with earth and limestone fragments to reclaim the environment, Texas Quarries Manager Robert Copeland said. The company now unearths two kinds of limestone—cordova shell with imprints of ancient ocean creatures and cordova cream with a smoother texture—in Liberty Hill and mills it on the former quarry property in Cedar Park. Both types of stone were formed by sediment at the bottom of an ocean that once covered Texas, Copeland said.
Dustin Nash, Texas Quarries architectural sales manager, said builders in Japan, Dubai and the UK order the company's limestone. It is also found in the Virginia Capitol, Texas banks, a University of Houston dormitory and the Walgreens on Crystal Falls Parkway in Leander, he said.
The company works with builders to plan the stones' shapes and any hand carving, Nash said.
"The placement of that material has already been predetermined before it gets to the job site," he said. "Through our process we're picking up stone and deciding where it's going to go."
Copeland said people often want to touch one of the finished stones.
"There's a romance there," Copeland said. "It wants you to feel the crispness, the smoothness of the material. What a rich history does this [limestone] have."
A third business in the vicinity of the rock-mining areas, Coreslab Structures Inc., does not operate a quarry. The company's Cedar Park location opened in 1988. Coreslab manufactures precast and prestressed concrete products for use in parking garages and other structures.
