My daughter went through Llano today on a geology field trip with her class from college. They went to see the Llanite nearby. Have you ever seen it? Her geology professor said it's the only blue quartz in the world. How neat!

She told me about all of the beautiful granite in Llano. She said there were cabinets, table tops and all sorts of other things made from it. She loved it!

Anyway, we weren't sure how the name of the town is pronounced. (I've never been there.) The Llanite is pronounced using the L sound at the beginning. Does Llano sound that way too? Or are the L's silent? In Wales, a double L is pronounced like an H. I told her I knew someone who used to live there and that I would ask... so I'm asking. :-)

-- Gayla (privacy@please.com), March 24, 2002

Answers

Guess I need to bump this to the next page so Lon will see it. (He's busy eating Oreos.) ;-)

-- Gayla (privacy@please.com), March 28, 2002.

Hi Gayla,

The granite around Llano is considerable. We had about two acres of the back pasture made of it. :-)

There used to be a large quarry close to where I grew up, between Llano and Marble Falls. I think a lot of the stone from there went to government buildings like the state capital. The Llano Uplift is a very famous geological feature in the center of the state, where the surface stones are very old. Nearby, Enchanted Rock is a small mountain which is a single exposed granite monolith.

The professor that named Llanite back in the 1800's, built a house in town which is now a bed and breakfast. It has a huge polished peice of Llanite as a bar. It's called the Badu House, after the name of Professor Badu.

Llano is named after the Spanish, "Llano Estacado", meaning "staked plain". This was a vast area of west Texas without many landmarks for the early explorers, and there are several versions as to what the name really means. One is that the stakes refered to were the tall shoots of the yucca bush. Another is that early travelers drove stakes into the ground to provide reference points for thier explorations.

Anyway, Llano has been Texicanized to the pronunciation, "LAN-OH", as if it has only a single L. Like most small towns, it was a good place to grow up. There was so much empty space that a kid had to absolutely be determined to get into trouble. And when you did, there was usually an old ranch hand around to kick your butt and tell you to straighten up, and that was the end of it. I'm going back for a class reunion (1968) in June. I can't wait to see how old everyone else has gotten!

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-- Perfesser Lon (lgal@exp.net), March 28, 2002.

((((Perfesser Lon)))) That was wonderful! Thank you! I can't wait to read it to my daughter. She came home with about 30 pounds of rock samples from all the places they visited. :-)

You're going to see how old everyone ELSE has gotten? Glad to hear you're staying young. ME TOO! ;-)

-- Gayla (privacy@please.com), March 28, 2002.

Gayla, if your daughter is interested in such, I'd recommend a book titled "Roadside Geology of Texas", by Darwin Spearing. It's a wonderful layman's guide to the geological history visible from the roadways. There is a narrow natural outcropping (dike) of lanite 9 miles north of Llano, at the roadside picnic area by the Baby Head Cemetery. (I've written a snapshot about the history of Baby Head here before). Llanite has red flecks of feldspar and blue quartz. The quartz is blueish because of chromium impurities. When polished, it is really lovely.

-- Lon Frank (lgal@exp.net), March 28, 2002.

Do you think LLon llikes llizards llaying on lladders llazilly lloafing Llano?

-- R. A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (racookpe@earthlink.net), March 29, 2002.

Llikely.

-- helllllllllllen (lllll@llllll.lllllll), March 29, 2002.

Lon, I'm really impressed!!! Thank you for all of the information. The forum has been down and I couldn't get back on until now. I'll print this out so I can share it with her. She brought home a piece of the Llanite for me to see. I was amazed that in some of her samples of granite, the pieces of Feldspar were very large. They were neat looking. My father is a geologist (among other things) and I guess her love of it comes naturally. :-)

-- Gayla (privacy@please.com), March 29, 2002.

You guys are hiLlarious! ;-)

-- Gayla (Llaughing@Robert.and HeLlen), March 29, 2002.

(Gayla, I think they are making fun of us) : -P

Anyway, our conversation reminded me of an old essay, an excerpt of which makes a good snapshot:

"Time, geologic time, looks out at us from the rocks as from no other objects in the landscape. Geologic time! How the striking of the great clock, whose hours are millions of years, reverberates out of the abyss of the past! Mountains fall and the foundations of the earth shift as it beats out the moments of terrestrial history. Rocks have literally come down to us from a foreworld. The youth of the earth is in the soil and in the trees and verdure that spring from it: its age is in the rocks.....Even if we do not know our geology, there is something in the face of a cliff and in the look of a granite boulder that gives us pause.........

The rocks have a history; gray and weatherworn, they are veterans of many battles’ they have most of them marched in the ranks of vast stone brigades during the ice age; they have been torn from the hills, recruited from the mountaintops, and marshaled on the plains and in the valleys; and now the elemental war is over, there they lie waging a gentle but incessant warfare with time and slowly, oh, so slowly, yielding to its attacks!" -------------John Burroughs

-- Llon Frank (lgal@exp.net), March 30, 2002.

I gave the information to my daughter. She was excited about the book. Her geology professor had mentioned it also, but she had forgotten the name. Now she has it in print. She wants to stay at that bed and breakfast. :-) Thank you for the neat essay! I'll share it with her, too.

I hope you guys didn't get blown away yesterday. We had some nasty weather here!

-- Gayla (privacy@please.com), March 31, 2002.

Clear today ... nice day, but I couldn't get outside!

-- R. A. Cook, PE (Marietta, GA) (racookpe@earthlink.net), April 01, 2002.

My son's girlfriend is from Llano and she brought me a chunck of Lanite from her home town. It has some beautiful colours in it. She has been looking for a piece of polished Lanite to give me but was not able to locate any. Does anyone have any suggestions? The family will be traveling from Toronto to Llano in the spring so I will be able to see the stone myself.

-- Sheila Sanderson Mole (sheila.sanderson-mole@bibliocentre.ca), October 18, 2002.