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of wabash county inc. www.thepaperofwabash.com May 28, 2014 Proudly Serving Wabash County Since 1977 Vol. 37, No. 12
PO Box 603, Wabash, IN 46992 (260) 563-8326
Seven years after breaking ground, West Plains Mining is still digging
by Eric Stearley eric@thepaperofwabash.com “There’s an expression, ‘If it can’t be grown, it’s got to be mined,’” said Will Woodward, owner and founder of West Plains Mining. “Everything in this world is either grown or mined.” Woodward is the owner of West Plains Mining, a limestone quarry just outside Richvalley. At just 34 years old, he’s already been in the industry for 21 years. “I started at age 13. I’m originally from Warsaw, Indiana, and I rode my bike up on Nov. 10 of 1993 and asked for a job at a gravel pit,” said Woodward. “My dad was a truck driver, so I wasn’t born into the industry. I started out just running equipment and cleaning loaders, doing oil changes…I did that for seven years.” Toward the end of that time, Woodward began attending Wabash College in Crawfordsville. He later worked as the production manager for six operations in northwest Indiana. Shortly after he started working on his MBA at Butler, he was offered a job in strategic planning for a Fortune 500 company in a five-state region. Seven years ago, he set out on his own to build something special. “I literally started the first month of the recession, so it was great timing on my part,” he joked. “We’ve got 333 acres on the whole site, so basically it runs from Richvalley all the way to Aleris. This was all fields, so when you see the hole, you’ll realize the magnitude of what we’ve done over the past 7 years.” Will has a passion for geology. His location, just east of Richvalley, is unique from that perspective. Most limestone quarries in northern Indiana mine ancient coral reefs. Woodward mines much deeper limestone in what he calls the “birthday cake,” three massive layers of limestone, each with different qualities and chemical makeup. In Indiana, the limestone formations are named after the place they were discovered. In this case, beneath a layer of overburden made up of shale, clay, sand, and gravel is a layer known as the Mississinewa formation. The lowest quality of the three layers, the Mississinewa formation is 111 feet thick, and it’s used for commercial purposes like building and road pads. Below this is the 92-foot-thick Louisville formation, which is made up of highquality, calcium-rich limestone. The final, 149-foot-thick layer is known as the Salamonie formation, which is made up of limestone rich in magnesium.
WILL WOODWARD, OWNER OF WEST PLAINS MINING, stands on the rim of the quarry near Richvalley on Tuesday, May 20. The pit is more than two hundred feet deep, and currently serves as the entrance to the business’ underground mining operation. The entrance tunnels pictured behind Woodward are 28 feet tall. Woodward opened the mine in May of 2007. (photo by Eric Stearley) Woodward’s first four years on the site were dedicated to removing overburden and mining the Mississinewa layer in open pits for commercial uses. Over the past two years, the focus has shifted to mining the Louisville layer using an underground tunnel system. “The way the economy was for the past 7 years, we weren’t moving a lot of this commercial stuff, because there just wasn’t as much building going on, but we had a lot of demand for the high-calcium, pure quality stuff, so it’s like, ‘hey, why not mine that stuff underground,’” said Woodward. People often ask Woodward why he chose to set up shop off of old 24. It comes down to geology. The mine sits atop a special formation where the Louisville layer is relatively close to the surface, just 130 feet down. As you move north or south of Wabash County, the layer falls off. “One reason I’m here is because if you
look at it from the side, here we have Wabash, and you have the Michigan basin on one side and you have the Illinois basin on the other,” said Woodward. “This higher quality stuff is closer to the surface. Like in South Bend, to get to the Louisville, you have to go 1,000 feet down. Basically it depresses down on each side.” The reason for this is an ancient archipelago. Woodward mines limestone deposited during the Silurian period. A string of barrier islands once peppered the landscape in what is now Wabash County, separating the ancient oceans, which filled the basins on either side. “416-460 million years ago, this was ocean bottom, so this is all ocean sediment that was built up over time, and what dictates the quality, believe it or not, is just how tranquil the Earth was in this location at that time,” said Woodward. “So typically the more tranquil it was, the higher quality it was.”
At the time the Louisville layer was deposited, the area was like a calm, backwater lagoon. This allowed for the formation of high-quality stone. When the Mississinewa layer was deposited some time later, there were more storm events in the area, resulting in a lower quality stone. “A lot of people don’t realize it, but Wabash County has one of the highest concentrations of ocean reefs in North America, but it was 400 million years ago,” said Woodward. “There are reefs all over the place here, like Hanging Rock is a reef.” The events of the distant past have shaped the underground landscape, making the mile-long stretch on which the mine sits a prime location for the operation. “It was pure economics. It was less overburden and commercial stuff to get through to get to the higher quality (continued on page 5)