Wood County Stone and Construction Co. Quarry, Portage, Wood County, Ohio, USAi

Regional Level Types
Wood County Stone and Construction Co. Quarry	Quarry
Portage	- not defined -
Wood County	County
Ohio	State
USA	Country

The Wood County and Construction Co. Quarry (Portage Quarry) was opened in the 1880s by Robert Whitney McMahan (Snowflake Lime Company) and then later by business partners Clarence Willard and Edward Eckert (Orton, 1888) (Hoyt, 1903). The dolostone from this quarry was originally used as railroad ballast. The quarry is located north of Portage, Ohio on the corner of Ohio Highway 25 and Ohio Highway 178 (Powell Road). The quarry remained active until 1962, when it slowly flooded to its present state when quarry workers hit natural springs (Rice, 1999) (Speweicke, 2015). The Portage Quarry is approximately 23 acres.

Jeff Rice, the former owner gave a brief history of the quarry’s heyday:

"When the owner of property west of the Quarry died, his daughter inherited the future mining rights. Following his death she was to receive $2.00 for every ton they dug on their property. An eccentric woman for the time, she was very flamboyant and was often spotted with her red Cadillac convertible. Her tastes for parties were taboo for the era, and she was a talk of the town of Bowling Green, even to this day."

"The further they mined onto her property, the more quarrymen ran into softer stone. To sustain her lifestyle she kept raising the cost for mining the stone, but wouldn’t sell the property. This was the 1950s and work was starting on Interstate 75. The mining company was the Wood County Stone Company and in 1962 pulled its pumps for a location south of the town of Portage. (The location would become the Stoneco [Maumee Stone Co.] Quarry) Jack Fellhauer had a week to get the steel from the basin of the quarry. He told me he worked around the clock pulling up what he could salvage but it filled up a third of the way in one week. Two springs are located in the middle of the South wall. You can feel the springs when you swim over by the trench. Jack Fellhauer died of cancer in 2006."

"Quarry mining was dangerous work. A former employee’s next door neighbor’s brother was killed in a dynamite explosion in 1947 that also took down the towers. At the time of the accident they thought the dynamite was not ready, they walked up and it blew." (Rice, 1999)

When it was an active producer of dolostone aggregate, excellent celestine crystals were collected and documented by Stout (1941), Fisher (1977), and Carlson (1983, 1991). Celestine specimens collected before a documented date of 1962 and have a “Portage, Ohio” label came from this quarry as the Maumee Stone Co. (now Stoneco) Portage Quarry was built to replace this quarry as an active producer. Celestine crystals from this quarry are very rare to find in collections today. Carlson (1991) referred to this locality as the "Old Wood County and Construction Co. Quarry".

The Wood County Construction Co. Quarry was reopened in 1978, not as an active producer of dolostone aggregate, but as a scuba quarry and recreational facility for those living in nearby Bowling Green, Ohio (though divers owned the site in the early 1970s) (Rice, 1999). The quarry was owned and later leased by Jeff Rice, a scuba diver and historian, and formed the “Portage Quarry Recreation Club”. Rice then expanded the park by building a beach, swimming facilities, a scuba dive shop, and a campground. According to Monica Lynn, a former manager at the quarry, she mentioned that Rice would host an annual event called “Legends of Diving” and bands were invited to play at the park. The property was then purchased by Jim Palmer Excavating in 2010 and the site was closed to the public in 2015 (Speweicke, 2015).

Underwater “artifacts” in the quarry include a school bus, a semi-trailer, a car pile, a grain silo and a Hansa HFP 320 Jet (added in 2006) which was trailered from the Toledo airport. These “artifacts” are still in the bottom of the quarry today.

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