In western Madison County, motorists headed from Pendleton Pike towards Maple Ridge Elementary School cross over Fall Creek. Just north of there, they might spot something strange rising out of the brush: a hulking cement structure that could be mistaken for Indiana’s own Stonehenge. It isn’t an ancient ruin, though- it’s the remains of an unloading rig, a leftover from the days when a busy gravel quarry once operated nearby.
I confess to not knowing much about the apparatus I found. Functional pieces of infrastructure don’t often make the paper, after all! Fortunately, I can fill in a few details. The loading station, as it’s probably best described1, sits just north of Ingalls. Around the time the railroad was extended that far from Pendleton, a quarry opened north of Fall Creek. A mile-long spur was built to access it2. Eventually, the gravel pit was abandoned and a new one was established on the east side of County Road 650-West3. The unloading tower must have been built to service it.
As the story goes, cars on the spur from Ingalls’ New York Central line backed in under the tower’s concrete hoppers while gravel was loaded inside. Afterwards, they traveled back onto the main line so the quarry’s stone could be used for ballast on a new railroad bed that made its way through Pendleton4.
I don’t know when the concrete hoppers were built, but they may date to the early 1920s. In 1925, the quarry was shipping six carloads of gravel per day5! By the following year, the Union Traction Company of interurban fame had established another spur to begin hauling stone away6.
Regardless of its provenance, the old stone quarry loading station near Pendleton and Ingalls is a weird landmark and a monument to days gone by that raises more questions than it answers. Who designed the concrete colossus? Was it really the source of the stone that shaped Pendleton’s rail lines? Why was it given some artistic flourishes, like its diamond-shaped arches? Maybe most importantly, why has it stood the test of a century when everything around it has changed?
Like many relics scattered across Indiana, Madison County’s old stone quarry loading station straddles the line between the ordinary and the mysterious. What was once just a boring piece of industrial infrastructure now reads like a monument that looms over the creek and hints at an age of quarries, spurs, and steel wheels. For me, that’s why places like this are important: Madison County’s old stone quarry loading station reminds us that even the most utilitarian structures can slip into myth once their purpose fades.
Sources Cited
1 Hidden Treasures of Madison County (n.d.). Stone Quarry Loading Station. The Anderson Herald-Bulletin. Web. Retrieved August 17, 2025.
2 (see footnote 2).
3 The Pendleton Scrapbook (1966, June 30). The Pendleton Times-Post. p. 1.
4 (See footnote 3).
5 (see footnote 1).
6 Gravel for State Roads (1925, May 20). The Anderson Herald. p. 13.
7 New Spur Finished (1926, May 26). The Alexandria Times-Tribune. p. 4.
Maybe it’s like the former Haynes Milling grain elevator on E Votaw St in Portland. The legend is, it was built so strong, it’d be nearly impossible, and very expensive, to demolish it. So it’s left to stand.
That could be! And that would be a good blog topic for next time I’m in town.