Hey listeners, Tyler McBrion here.
The next episode of Who Blope The Guidestones will be coming each week on Tuesdays.
“But in the meantime, we'll be sharing some bonus segments, extra pieces of our journey”
that didn't make it into the full episodes. Like this one. The video does a really great job of explaining what goes on here and gives you just a good overview of everything. So it's about 14 minutes.
I hope there's a chair right here. I'm at the Elberton Granite Museum.
Watching the video that every visitor to the museum gets to see, it's an introduction to
the Granite Industry in Elberton. It was made by local high school students.
“There's footage of deep quarries, huge cranes pulling newly blasted slabs out of the”
earth, craftsmen, sand blasting monuments, and then at the very end, a sweeping landscape shot of the Georgia Guidestones, with a line that now sounds ironic. Creating memories that stand the test of time. It's been over three years since someone blew up the Guidestones. And this video obviously hasn't been updated since then.
We're here at the museum to see Chris Kubis, a star right here.
He's the executive vice president of the Elberton Granite Association, which represents over 150 companies that make up the Granite Industry around here. He's agreed to give us a tour. Why don't we talk a little bit about the Granite Industry here and its formation and where we came from too, where we're at today.
“I love niche hyperlocal museums, so for me, this place is a dream.”
Every inch of wall space is covered with something. Archival photographs, news clippings, it's the kind of place where beautifully carved Granite sea lion sits right next to an industrial granite cutting saw, and both are treated like works of high art. The Granite Industry started here in Elberton, probably in the mid-1570s.
So what happened is a couple of gentlemen that were prominent here in the city, started to Granite quarries, then they were here. Don't get me wrong. Chris is telling us some interesting history, and then 1900 that's one we start seeing. But I get distracted.
Something catches my eye toward the back of the museum. I can see stone feet poking out of a doorway. And what led to that was actually the statue of Duchy. Chris walks us into a dimly lit room. In there, I see the statue in full.
Wow. Okay, so this is Duchy, this is the original statue. It's a stone man, but he's not on a pedestal like other Granite in the museum. He's laying down on one of those roller carts you see at Home Depot. And you don't have to look too closely to see that both of his legs are broken off.
This Granite man with the broken legs, his name is Duchy. Can you tell us how the name is Duchy? So from what I gather, people had kind of made comments that it looked like a cross between a hippopotamus and a Pennsylvania Dutchman, and so they started calling him Duchy. They nailed it.
Yes. I don't know. He's been a bed for quite a while. Chris begins to tell us Duchy's story and it's a good one. In about 1896 or seven, there was a group of women.
They were the Confederate veterans society. They decided that they wanted to have a statue placed in town on other Confederate soldiers. And a sculptor was brought in and he sculpted a statue that was going to be placed on the
Town square.
The day of the unveiling town officials had covered Duchy up for dramatic effect.
“But as the sheets came off, as the story goes, people weren't odd.”
They were offended. And from where I'm standing, as Chris tells me this story, I kind of get it.
First of all, the proportions are all wonky.
Duchy's head is huge. His eyes are a little, let's call them bulbous. But apparently there was a bigger problem. Well, they thought that it looked like a union soldier. There was a couple of different features about it and they thought it looked like a Yankee.
And they surely didn't want a Yankee watching over their town. The unveiling went up like a lead balloon.
“People walked away from the statue grumbling, but nobody really did anything.”
Okay, maybe there was a little name calling.
Everyone hated Duchy, resentment grew and grew until one summer night. Some people took it upon themselves to do something. So in August of 1900, on August evening, the statue was attacked by group of citizens. And they threw a rope around it and they pulled it down and it fell to the ground. And it broke into about three or four pieces.
And they just left it there. The next morning when everybody got up there was Duchy land on the ground, he was broken. As ceremoniously as he was unveiled, he was unceremoniously dumped. No plaque, no marker.
“People in town put him in a hole near where he fell.”
He actually, he was buried face down in his grave, which is an act of disrespect for a soldier to be buried face down. Elberton moved on and while Duchy lay in the ground, the granite industry in Elberton, Albert County exploded. In the decades since, Elberton was no longer just a quarry town.
It was a bona fide boom town. In 1982, a group of Elbertonians got a wild idea to go find Duchy. It had been over 80 years since Duchy went into the ground. They started digging until they hit stone. And there was Duchy laying in the Georgia red clay.
And so when they took him out, they lifted him up, you know, he was covered in red mud. They put him on a trailer and they took him to the local car wash and they washed him up there. What the pieces that you see here, these are actually the pieces that this is how he would have looked when he was falling his pedestal down in the town square.
I was surprised to hear that something like this had happened before. Duchy was kind of weird looking, sure. But people projected a lot onto this statue, enough to destroy it, and give it an undignified burial. So, as I say, grant a monument in town that people don't quite like at night.
Someone takes it upon themselves to take it down. I wonder if the parallels...
Well, it is actually the first granted Confederate war statue to be torn down.
And we've seen that in recent years for other statues to come down, but Duchy was first. The irony, of course, is that Albertonians tore this Confederate monument down, not out of any real reckoning with Confederacy, and its dark history of slavery. But because it wasn't pro-confederacy enough, it turns out there are all kinds of surprising reasons why someone would hate a monument so much they want to destroy it.
Tune in next week for a new episode. Until then, thanks to all of you for following along and sharing this show, it means a lot. If you like this series, you're only scratching the surface. Head over to the app store now and download the AJC app and find out for yourself. Thanks for listening.
