Blast From the Past

There was a time when lime rocked Northwest Arkansas.

"That wasn't an earthquake last Friday evening, but it was one of the largest blasts ever put off at the lime quarries here (in Johnson)," Marion Mason wrote in The Springdale News in 1907. "The charge consisted of several hundred sticks of dynamite all fired at once by means of a battery, and rock enough was displaced to furnish work ... for quite a while. "

For some 60 years -- from the 1880s to the 1940s -- quarries around Northwest Arkansas furnished trainloads of lime, shipped all over the United States for use in cement, plaster, mortar and fertilizer. Now the lime industry -- and particularly the quarry in Johnson -- is getting its share of the limelight at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History. The exhibit -- appropriately titled "Limelight" -- came about because of a collection of Mason's photos, donated by Maudine Sanders, a benefactor of the museum who was a leader in recognizing the need to preserve community history.

Mason, explains Marie Demeroukas, curator of the exhibit and the museum's photo archivist, "was a prolific amateur photographer and the Johnson correspondent for The Springdale News. We have a lot of photos he took -- lots of images out at the quarries -- and corresponding writings in the newspaper.

"This is geeky fun for me," Demeroukas says happily. "I like this topic. I like the whole industrial side of it."

Harvesting lime from the region's limestone bluffs wasn't as simple as it sounds, she says. It involved digging out the rock, chopping it up, then throwing it in a massive lime kiln, where the temperature might reach 2,200 degrees. Cooking the lime changed it chemically, she says, producing a powder called "quicklime."

"Quicklime was dangerous," Demeroukas writes in the exhibit notes. "When mixed with water, quicklime creates a violent chemical reaction."

"It would take the hide right off you," lime kiln worker Al Luper once recalled, and it would burn wherever it was -- storage shed, train car. Luper even remembered seeing patches of lime burning in Clear Creek.

By the mid-1940s, the veins of lime in Johnson were largely depleted, and the business tapered off throughout the region at much the same time as did hardwood and apples, for much the same reason: Railroad service was changing, and without it, shipping the massive barrels of lime was cost prohibitive.

The first thing Demeroukas learned, she says, is how many quarries there were. The second was the lasting impact of the mining.

"They created these giant caves as they dug into the bluff," she says. "Zero Mountain (a cold storage warehouse) is actually in some of the old quarries."

-- Becca Martin-Brown

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