OLPE ? Bob Davis was digging a livestock pond west of Olpe about 18 months ago when he struck such a mass of rock that he had to stop digging. He moved about a half-mile west to try again and encountered the same problem.

Another man might have been frustrated and given up, but Davis saw an opportunity.

“I got to thinking, ‘there’s got to be something here,'” Davis said.

Davis was right. Further analysis showed that Davis’ ranch contains tons and tons of marble that now is being harvested and sold by Davis’ new company, Pyramid Stone. The company logo features a three-dimensional pyramid to illustrate its name, and a catchline, “Flint Hills Stone, Natural Beauty.”

The marble is being used for floor and wall tile, patios, fireplaces and recreational areas, while larger pieces are going into walls of expensive houses; negotiations are under way to develop additional uses.

“We sell a lot of it,” Davis said, naming Oklahoma, Missouri and Nebraska as steady markets, although boundaries extend well beyond that from time to time.

Sutherland’s has exclusive rights as Pyramid Stone’s dealer in this area.

Recently at the scale house, Davis displayed foot-square tiles that had been cut and polished for flooring.

“See the fossils in it?” he asked, showing a finished tile with fossils adding interest to the natural pattern of light to dark grays. The marble was sent to Traventine, N.M., for processing into tiles, then shipped back. Nearby, a tall, broad piece of marble stood propped against a wall.

“That will polish up like a mirror,” he said.

Similar pieces already have been made into headstones for Davis’ brother, Frank, who died recently, and for his wife, himself, an aunt and uncle and a friend.

The possibilities for using marble continue to unfold for the lifelong rancher and agribusinessman.

He talked about this new – and totally unexpected – venture as he drove his Chevy 4×4 through a pasture full of neatly stacked piles of giant marble squares and rectangles.

“You never know what’s going to come out of the ground,” he said, pointing toward a perfectly formed 25-foot spear leaning against the tablets of marble.

Some of the marble seems to shape itself; other pieces have to be broken to be pulled from the ground.

“It’s laying in there in seams,” Davis said. “Some of them are so big we have to drive wedges and then split them.”

Most come out in thick squares or rectangles. A gigantic piece, with almost perfectly straight lines and estimated to weigh 110,000 pounds, eventually will be purchased and removed.

Until then, it forms part of the base of a dig area.

“I don’t go any deeper than this,” Davis said, driving into a marble pit about 20 feet deep, “but this will extend for miles.”

Below that depth, bringing out marble is not economically feasible, he said. The marble in the ground may be free for the taking, but the cost of getting it out and hauling it to another destination is not. Davis invested in a number of pieces of equipment to develop Pyramid Stone, including massive fork lifts and digging scoops that can handle tons of weight and bring it to the surface.

“This was an old ocean floor 230 million years ago,” Davis said on a drive-through of a section currently being worked. Flakier sections around the marble show evidence of the volcanic eruptions and upheavals that occurred as the marble was being created.

“This was probably a desert for two thousand, three thousand years,” he said. “It laid there for thousands of years in the heat and the sun and as it dried up, it probably cracked itself.”

The results of all that geologic activity are being uncovered little by little on about 1,000 acres of pastureland that hold a part of the family history.