Discovery 1884: Northern Greene County around the town of Phenix, Missouri
Blasting for the Missouri, Kansas City (KC), Clinton, Springfield railroad uncovered a major limestone deposit. C.R. Hunt KC operated the quarry as the Phenix Stone and Lime Company; however, in 1905 a marble finisher in Milwaukee by the name of W.J.Grant had a piece of the Phenix stone in his shop. Grant recognizing that the stone was very high grade and took a polish, he made his way to KC and purchased an interest in Hunt’s business.
For the first three decades, the Phenix Marble Company was one of the largest producers of cut stone and marble in the (then) West; its quarry employed hundreds of people and produced more than 250,000 cubic feet of stone annually. Phenix cut stone and its signature Napoleon Gray marble were distributed by Tomkins-Kiel Marble Company nationwide with its showrooms in many cities including Kansas City, St. Louis, on 5th Avenue in New York and Market Street in San Francisco. Napoleon Gray adorns the walls of the New York Stock Exchange, the grand entrance of the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, as well as, train stations, banks, capital buildings, museums, grand hotels and other public and commercial buildings across the nation.
With the abandonment of the railroad during The Great Depression, the track that carried the material to market came to a grinding halt and so did the production of Phenix cut stone. During World War II, much of iron equipment was commandeered to provide raw material for the effort. After the war, the American market was flooded by marble returning from Europe on ships that were supplying there building efforts. European industry and agriculture had been decimated, and raw materials like stone were the only products available for trade. The quarry was abandoned.
Present Day. The extraordinary cut stone and marble deposits that adorn buildings from a century ago is far from exhausted, the site was purchased and re-opened so that today, the new NSX / Phenix Marble Company is once again able to supply fine interior and exterior stone from the same source using a combination of modern mining techniques and traditional craftsmanship.