Georgia Marble Company History

The deposit that became the Georgia Marble Company was found in 1835 by Henry T. Fitzsimmons, an itinerant Irish stone cutter, on Samuel Tate's north Georgia property near what became Marble Hill, Georgia. Nearly half a century passed between that discovery and the founding of a company to work it — the interval in which the deposit's extent and quality became known in the north Georgia marble belt.

The Georgia Marble Company was founded and organized in 1884 on Samuel Tate's land — a founding date corroborated independently by Wikipedia and by Polycor's own company-history page.

Over the following century the company organized its work into three product groups. Dimension Stone was fabricated at two plants: the Memorial Products Plant at Tate, Georgia, which historically produced personal monuments and markers, private and community mausoleums, crypt fronts, and decorative cemetery features; and the Structural Products Plant at Nelson, Georgia, which historically fabricated panels, columns, floor tile, thresholds, sills, benches, signage, and custom architectural work, and also imported marble and granite from international sources. Industrial minerals drew on the quarry stone's near-pure crystalline calcium carbonate to supply ground-marble products to manufacturers. Consumer products applied the same ground stone and pelletized lime to landscape and pool markets. Georgia Marble has long described the stone's unusually large interlocked crystals as resisting penetration by moisture and water-borne dirt, and its purity as helping it wear evenly — a long-standing company description rather than an independently lab-verified performance claim. The work itself carried a craft continuity: fabricators whose fathers and grandfathers quarried and cut the same stone.

The company's twentieth-century ownership is documented through two strands of sourcing. An independent source (Wikipedia) traces a chain: the company passed through Jim Walter Corporation in 1969, then through Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), Hillsborough Holding Corporation, and First Chicago Corporation. Separately, the company's own archival record from 1997 describes it as an operating company of DBK Minerals, Inc., itself a wholly-owned subsidiary of IMETAL. IMETAL renamed itself Imerys in 1999, establishing DBK/IMETAL as the immediate predecessor to the Imerys period.

This places the documented ownership picture as: Jim Walter Corporation (1969) → KKR → Hillsborough Holding Corporation → First Chicago Corporation → DBK Minerals, Inc. (1997, a wholly-owned subsidiary of IMETAL) → Imerys (from 1999). The chain is presented as documented rather than as a complete continuous sequence; any step between First Chicago Corporation and DBK Minerals, Inc. that the available sources do not cover is omitted rather than inferred.

In 2003, Polycor Inc. acquired the dimension-stone division from Imerys. Today Polycor operates an active Georgia Marble Quarry and Georgia Marble Plant at Tate, Georgia, plus a Marble Hill Quarry, actively quarrying and marketing Georgia Marble varieties. The historical Structural Products Plant at Nelson, Georgia, and the three-plant, three-product-group structure described above belong to that earlier era; the current operating status of the Nelson plant under Polycor is not confirmed and is presented here as history rather than as a statement about today's operations.

The Georgia Marble Company and Tate Historic District, Tate, Georgia, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a formal recognition of the district's place in the region's industrial and architectural history. Georgia Marble retains its name and identity throughout this record; Polycor is named here as the current owner of the dimension-stone operation, not as a replacement for the brand.