Buchanan Dam Salt Works and Granite Industry

• 
• 
• 

Further west from Liberty Hill on Texas State Highway 29, toward Buchanan Dam (and past the wonderful boudin kolaches at Gude’s Bakery), are the Confederate-era Salt Works and the later nineteenth-century granite quarries.

C.S.A. Salt Works

Located between Tow Valley and Old Bluffton, 15 miles NE, since 1935 under Lake Buchanan.

During the Civil War made salt for table, curing meat and hides, feeding cavalry horses.

A day’s boiling in 100 iron, 250-gallon kettles produced 20 to 30 bushels of salt. Cooled, sacked and hauled out, this met Texas’ wartime shortages.

First Llano County District Court was held at Salt Works. Stagecoach stop was nearby.

Brine here was from Cambrian Sea Waters trapped 500 million years ago in sand and strata. Indians led first settler here.

(1964)

If I’m reading this right, this marker is commemorating something we can’t see: the Salt Works has been under Lake Buchanan since Lake Buchanan was created in 1935 with the building of Buchanan Dam. If you look closely at the photo you can see the water in the distance.

Granite Industry in Llano County

Throughout Llano County, large granite outcrops exist. The first granite quarry in Llano County opened in 1888 on the Llano River. When the railroad arrived in 1892, the demand for granite rapidly increased. Italian Immigrant Vincenzo Fantozzi Petrick came to Llano County, established a quarry and provided stone for use in Texas’ coastal jetties. When Buchanan Dam was completed, men and materials were diverted to the war effort and work at Petrick’s quarry declined. Llano’s granite can be seen in the state capitol, the University of Texas at Austin, the Federal Building in Kansas City, Missouri, and in many monuments across Texas. Quarries owned by Petrick contributed to Llano County’s Success.

(2014)

Most of these signs are themselves historical, and so reflect historical mindsets. This is the newest, and the only one erected in the twenty-first century. The next youngest is the 1996 Kothmann Homesite sign and then the 1971 Liberty Hill Cemetery sign.¹ While I’ve yet to see one as bad as Louisiana’s 1950 Colfax Courthouse celebration of massacring ex-slaves and the Republicans who were helping them vote, they definitely date to another era in Texas politics.

Petrick’s granite was, unsurprisingly, used by local builders for local buildings. The January 16, 1941, Llano News described the building of a new Llano (city) Fire Department building:

The new building will be of pink granite, quarried in the Petrick quarry near Buchanan Dam in Llano county and will be shipped to Llano for shaping by the NYA boys. This class of work will mean that as many boys as apply for work and are passed can be used on the project.

“NYA” was an acronym for the New Deal-era National Youth Administration. The NYA had been part of the better-known Works Progress Administration, and focused on workers between the ages of 16 and 25. But by 1941 it had moved to a newly-created Federal Security Agency, the predecessor to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

While it sounds on the surface of it weird for a works program to be transferred to a security agency, in fact all of the names were very much products of the time. The best-known program of the Federal Security Agency is probably Social Security.

The National Youth Administration, like its sibling the Civilian Conservation Corps also under the Federal Security Agency, was youth-oriented, with the NYA specifically being about work training. The Federal Security Agency also contained the Office of Education, which focused on schooling.

The Federal Security Agency basically packed up the young, the old, the blind, and, by 1941, the insane.

By 1941, Vincenzo Petrick may or may not have been involved with his namesake quarry. There’s a list of court cases in the November 4, 1937, Llano News that includes, among a whole lot of cases for a small town, “State of Texas vs. Vincenzo Petrick; suit for taxes.”

I haven’t found anything else about this case, however, so I don’t know if Vincenzo Petrick was Vincenzo Fantozzi Petrick or a descendant, or how the case ended up.

It’s a random reminder of the inevitability of death and taxes.

If you’re taking State Highway 29 from Liberty Hill to Buchanan Dam, you’ll pass through Burnet. If you need a quick snack or breakfast on your road trip, I highly recommend the boudin kolaches at Gude’s.

1. Reichenau Gap’s marker is dated both 1966 and 2008.

   ↑