Elberton, Georgia, calls itself the "Granite Capital of the World" because the surrounding area's quarries have supplied America with granite for buildings and funereal monuments for decades. The town is nonethless built almost entirely of other materials, mostly brick (see well below). The buidling shown above is a rare exception, in that at least one of its walls consists of blocks of typical blue-gray Elberton granite (just below). The building is the Auld's Corner building, built in 1941 as part of a corner gasoline station at a site that the cornerstone suggests had been owned by the Auld family since 1870.

Elberton granite was used as an accent on the Elbert County Courthouse (below). However, most of the Courthouse is brick. In fact, the red look below is only the result of paint; Ed Jackson's photo shows a more attractive white or light gray courthouse.

Another brick building in Elberton with at least a little granite is the old Masonic Hall (below). It may have been one of Elberton's most attractive buildings, although the boarded-up windows lessen its beauty today. The stone trim is granite, but a close examination reveals that it is not Elberton blue, and it may not be from Elberton at all. If so, the expression "hauling coals to Newcastle" was matched here by hauling granite to Elberton.

The image below shows one of the Elberton granite quarries. These quarries can be very deep: note the stairway at upper right of the image for scale. When North America and Africa collided in the Pennsyvanian (about 300 million years ago), the collsion buried and compressed pre-existing rocks to make the metamorphic rocks of the Piedmont featured elsewhere in this gallery. At about the same time, molten rock (magma) made its way up through the crust to form discrete bodies of granite. Stone Mountain is one topographically prominent example of these granite bodies. The Elberton Granite isn't as prominent as a landscape feature but has proven to be a great economic resource, as shown below.

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