CONCORD — During the famous 1963 civil rights rally at the Lincoln Memorial, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of letting freedom ring from the “prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.”

Those prodigious hilltops are built on granite bedrock once used for the facades, steps and columns of many buildings and monuments in Washington, New York City and around the world.

However, the granite for the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial scheduled to be unveiled in our nation's capital is not from New Hampshire — or Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, North Carolina or Idaho — it is from China, as is much of the granite for monuments today.

New Hampshire is known as the Granite State for a reason. A century ago, granite quarries dotted the state from Concord to Milford, and Troy to the Conway area.

The Library of Congress was built with more than 30,000 tons of New Hampshire granite, according to the New Hampshire Folklife learning center.

The largest quarry in New Hampshire belongs to Swenson Granite Works of Concord, on Rattlesnake Hill behind the State Prison for Men.

A fourth-generation family business, Swenson has provided granite for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Brooklyn Bridge, numerous Civil War memorials, and recently the Pentagon steps to replace those destroyed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It is also the source of granite for the yet to be unveiled profile of the Old Man of the Mountain in Franconia State Park.

Swenson Granite Works is the only remaining New Hampshire-based company doing its own granite quarrying.

On Friday, company Vice President Kevin Swenson said that although he wasn't familiar with the details of the King memorial project, the fact the granite came from China was “a sign of the times.”

“China has been a major exporter for quite a while now, and it's carried over into the stone business,” Swenson said. “Even with such a large-scale project, it is always surprising when something that is really an American event comes from somewhere else.”

He said India is also exporting a lot of stone around the world and into the United States.

While New Hampshire granite at one time was cut into large building blocks, that has not been the case for many years. Swenson said as the technology to cut granite improved, the pieces became thinner and thinner and now are pretty much a veneer over steel. “Our primary products over the last 20 to 30 years have been (highway and sidewalk) curbing and landscaping stone and ornaments,” he said.

Swenson is providing the five large stone pieces that comprise the reproduction of the profile of Old Man of the Mountain. But he noted it has been somewhat controversial because the stone came from Rock of Ages quarry in Barre, Vt., which Swenson owns.