Quarry Drillers

The image on the left depicts two anonymous men surrounded by stones, wearing overalls, gloves and hats and holding large electric drills. 

The image on the right depicts Wilbur German operating a drill. The first percussion rock drills were patented in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The steel drills were propelled by steam. No efficient steam drill models would have been available in Beachville until after the 1860s. Workers, like Wilbur German, who joined the drilling crews, worked their way up. A former driller, Stanley Roy Pullen, recalls getting recruited while still in school to drive horses and wagons to the kilns at the Downing-Bremner quarries. After graduating, they were assigned to “piece work” – loading stone into buckets – at Beachville White Lime. He earned 14 cents a ton. Later, he moved to a drilling crew when steam drills were still used. By the 1960s, drill operators at Beachville’s quarries had higher pay rates than quarry labourers, dynamite handlers, car loaders, and blacksmiths.