Granite Lives: Black Quarry Workers Of Lithonia

Despite pay disparities and harsh working conditions, Black quarry workers were instrumental in the growth of a granite industry that made Lithonia prosperous.

The ledge shudders before you feel it in your chest. A sharp hiss of steel on stone fills the air, ting, ting, ting, as a line of Black men swings hammers against hand drills, arms rising and falling in rhythm. Their boots grip rough granite. Dust whitens the creases of trousers. Sweat traces clean lines down gray‑powdered faces. Eight hours in, drill steels burn hot in callused palms; every strike sends a shock up their wrists, elbows, shoulders, and spine. By quitting time, the vibration sits deep in the bones. This was quarry work in Lithonia, where Black men helped to power the granite industry that made the town synonymous with stone. From the late nineteenth century through the mid‑twentieth century, they blasted and hauled rock from ledges around Arabia Mountain and Stone Mountain, turning raw outcrop into blocks, curbing, and building stone shipped far beyond DeKalb County. Their work brought prosperity to Lithonia, which became known as the “City of Granite.” It’s even in the city’s name, which derives from the Greek word lithos for “stone.” 

A Day In The Life

Photographs show them dwarfed by granite squares larger than wagons. Men sit in rows along freshly cut ledges, boots near the edge, hammers raised. There are no helmets. No harnesses. Only practiced hands and steady footing. These were not anonymous laborers. They were skilled quarrymen who could read the stone, drill straight, set charges precisely, and, in many cases, dress faces true. The work was dangerous. Each blast filled the air with fine crystalline dust, silica that lodged in the lungs and scarred tissue over time. Silicosis crept slowly, often claiming men years after they left the quarry floor.¹ There were sudden injuries too: crushed limbs when blocks shifted, broken bones from falls, joints worn down from years of bracing against uneven rock.² To work the ledge was to exchange strength and breath for a wage that was never guaranteed.

And historic ledgers from the Arabia Alliance archive show how that wage was measured. In a 1931 time-book from the Reagin Granite Company—one of numerous local quarries—two men, UE Kelley and Roy McMulan (potentially a misspelling of McMullen), recorded the same amount of time worked. Their totals sit side by side on the page. One earned $14.00 for a week’s work. The other earned $5.25. The hours are identical. The pay is not.³ The difference was that Kelley was White and McMulan was Black.

Elsewhere in the same books, totals and rates vary widely. The columns are neat. The arithmetic is precise. But the disparity is unmistakable. Black employees were paid significantly less than their White counterparts, around two-thirds less. Black and White were even kept segregated on the ledger page by a blank space seen below.

These records faithfully measure time; they do not explain why identical labor yielded unequal compensation. Under the same sun and on the same granite ledges, one man’s work was valued at nearly three times another’s. Over months and years, those differences shaped what families could save, what they could withstand when illness struck, and how long a household could survive a missed shift.³

A Community’s Building Blocks

Yet the story does not end at the quarry edge. The same men who drilled and blasted stone also used their skills to build community. In 1938, Black quarry hands constructed the original Bruce Street School, DeKalb County’s first Black public school, using local granite.⁴ They laid the foundations of Black education with rock pulled from the same ledges that damaged their bodies.

In homes across Lithonia, quarry workers also built fireplaces, steps, retaining walls, patios, and even granite hearths, turning industrial stone into family warmth. What companies sold as products, workers reshaped as permanence. Neighborhoods grew around quarry wages. Churches and fraternal lodges supported families when injury or silicosis struck.¹ Cemeteries in Lithonia likely hold many quarry workers whose labor built the town but whose names rarely appear in promotional brochures or history books.

One of those workers was Gus Kilgore, Sr. “My granddad had us using dynamite at 10 years old, packing holes in the outcrop,” said Reggie Kilgore, Gus’s grandson and a third generation Lithonia quarry worker and stone mason. “He’d let us know in the process of packing the holes [that] it would blow up in our faces if we packed it too tight. And I was like, ‘Why couldn’t you have pre-told us that?’ But he was like that. He was a tough trainer. He strived for the best.”

A Family Profession

Like many stone workers from the early-to-mid 20th Century, Gus Kilgore, Sr. bumped around between numerous quarries in the area, including the most famous, Big Ledge, later owned by the Davidson family and renamed the Davidson Granite Co. Although a dangerous job, working on the outcrop provided more income for Kilgore’s growing family and was the best job opportunity for both Black and White workers in Southeast DeKalb, which was largely rural at the time. It also provided some upward mobility, as many quarry workers, after years on the outcrop, frequently moved up to masonry work, which paid better and was often unionized. But the work took its toll on a generation of quarry workers, many of whom later developed lung-related ailments like silicosis due to years of breathing in granitic dust. 

“We learned from that,” said Reggie Kilgore about his grandfather’s generation of quarry workers. “They done a lot of work on the quarries. They didn’t use masks and it affected them later…breathing problems and cancer. They didn’t wear too much ear protection either.”

Reggie and his father Judge were more cautious as both followed in the footsteps of the family patriarch Gus Kilgore. Reggie was introduced to the work when he was just eight or nine years old in the late 1960s. Both he and his father Judge later moved on from quarry work to skilled stone masonry. At 65, Reggie still takes masonry projects and, from time to time, still goes out to the quarry to “do a little something” to show he can handle it. By the time Reggie began working in the quarries, the Civil Rights movement had made an impact on both pay and race relations. In a 1969 time-book from the same Reagin Granite Co., gone is the blank space segregating Black from White employees in the ledger, and pay rates appear more equitable.

“They had a lot of friends,” said Kilgore about the quarry workers he knew. “Whether you were black, white, red, grey or green, they all treated us like one family. A family of masons, a family of quarrymen, everybody knew everybody.”

Kilgore and others talk more about the life of quarry workers in this short documentary Lithonia: The City That Stone Built, produced by the Arabia Alliance.

A Legacy Written In Stone

Industry materials celebrate what granite became: curbs, monuments, civic buildings, while often leaving the workers unnamed. But the photographs, payroll books, and oral histories restore them to the center of the narrative. They show men poised along ledges, recorded in ink, visible in stone.³ The granite endures. It still lines Atlanta’s streets as curbing and supports many porches. It frames schoolhouses and churches. It anchors fireplaces that still warm living rooms. But the stone is not neutral. It carries the memory of hands that drilled it, lungs that breathed its dust, and bodies that absorbed its shock.

To drive through the City of Lithonia today is to move through a landscape shaped by Black quarry workers, men who endured danger and inequity, then used their craft to build something lasting for their families. Their names may fade from ledgers. The granite does not.³⁴

 

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If you enjoyed this story, please consider pre-ordering a copy of Images of America: Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area, due out April 7th. This is the first book published about Arabia Mountain NHA and contains many more historic images and never-before-told stories!

Footnotes

1. Georgia Health News, “Dangerous Dust: Silica Exposure Haunts Former Workers in an Iconic Georgia Industry,” March 31, 2018, https://www.georgiahealthnews.com/2018/04/dangerous-dust-silica-exposure-haunts-workers-iconic-georgia-industry/.[georgiahealthnews]​
2. D. J. Bell et al., “Musculoskeletal Symptoms among Stone, Sand and Gravel Mine Workers and Associations with Sociodemographic and Job-Related Factors,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17, no. 10 (2020): 1–13, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7277222/.[pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih]​
3. Reagin Granite Co., Weekly Time Books and Payroll Ledgers, 1931–1960s, Lithonia, Georgia (Courtesy of Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area).
4. Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area, “How the Bruce Street School Fought for Equality,” February 10, 2026, https://arabiaalliance.org/field-notes/chiseling-freedom-how-the-bruce-street-school-sparked-a-fight-for-equality/.[arabiaalliance]​