Romualdo Pacheco was a colorful and influential Californio, an early Californian of Mexican ancestry, who also happened to be the uncle of Graniterock founder Arthur R. Wilson. He is the only Hispanic to ever serve as governor of California, the first governor who was born in California, and was also an attorney, military officer, diplomat and mining investor. An accomplished sailor and horseman, he is the only California governor ever known to have lassoed a grizzly bear! Graniterock funded the Pacheco Scholarship Award in 1993 in his memory.
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How does your business manage customer feedback? Your feedback could arrive in a letter, a phone call, a face-to-face meeting, or a formal customer satisfaction survey. Most organizations focus nearly all their time and energy on what didn’t go well. If your goal is to be the best at earning a customer’s business every day, you’ll work to attack problem areas and correct them. You may think that by eliminating any negatives, your customers will want to continue to do business with you. Actually, this approach is far from complete.
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75 years ago, in 1938, when heavy rainfall caused flooding along the Pajaro River the Granite Rock Company quarry filled with water three feet deep. Bill Codiga, step-grandson of Ambrose Rossi, recalled his grandmother, stranded in her home there. “She would not come out of her house and they had to take her out in a rowboat.”
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Watsonville’s Historic Railroad Depot is one of the few depots still remaining of the many built by the Southern Pacific Railroad during California’s glory days of train travel. The structure itself has been almost unchanged since it was built in 1895, and is a wonderful reminder of the rich history of train travel in our region. Trains and rail transport have been a part of Graniterock history since 1876, when a deposit of granite rock was first discovered by railroad surveyors as they prepared to lay track along the Pajaro River Gap between Watsonville and San Juan Bautista. Since then, narrow and standard gauge steam locomotives, diesel engines and fleets of rail cars have helped to transport crushed granite rock within the A.R. Wilson Quarry and beyond to construction sites throughout California. 
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California’s Salinas Valley is famous as the “Salad Bowl of the Nation” and also as the birthplace of John Steinbeck, who was born in Salinas in 1902. He spent his childhood and adolescence there, and as a teenager took on a variety of summer jobs. One of these was with Graniterock, where he worked as a part of the paving crew that built “Cauliflower Boulevard”, the highway from Salinas to Castroville . Although Steinbeck’s employment with Graniterock didn’t last long, he did go on to find success as a writer, earning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.
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On February 14, Graniterock will celebrate its 113th birthday, and this year’s celebration is highlighted by the publication of a new children’s picture book, Engine Number Ten, A Nearly True Tale Told by Rose Ann Woolpert. Kick-off events are being held at the Corporate Office in Watsonville on Wednesday and Thursday of this week, and in Cupertino on Friday.
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This interview with Graniterock Transportation Division Operations Manager Denny Mahler was published by the Hollister Free Lance in 2001.
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100 years ago, in 1912, at what was then known as the Logan Quarry (now A.R. Wilson Quarry), horse-drawn carts were replaced with a new Porter 0-4-0 steam locomotive. Granite Rock Company Engine Number One was used to haul carloads of broken rock from the quarry face to the crusher. The quarry face was 100 feet above the crushing plant and Southern Pacific mainline railroad tracks, and rock was dropped through chutes from above the crusher to the plant.
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Betty Clay shared her memories with Rose Ann Woolpert in April, 2012.
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In a recent interview, John Green spoke at length about his time with Granite Rock Company, where he worked first as a “sample boy” at Logan Quarry and eventually worked his way up to Quarry Superintendent. He told stories which include many of the people he worked with over the years, such as Paul Mahler, Elmer Neyens, Carl Preston, Oscar Davies, Roy Goodwin, Ray Johnson, Jay Woods, Claude Mason and Skeeter Hanson, and talked about many of the changes that transformed the Quarry and the Company during his thirty-two year career. This last installment recalls the Installation of the Mile Long Conveyor.
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