Southern Pacific train 1-BACI-T-2-05, an intermodal train which originated in Oakland CA and is headed to southern California's City of Industry (yes, that is the city's full name!), passes by the large cement plant in the unincorporated community of Monolith (formerly, Aqueduct), in Kern County's Tehachapi Valley. The community is located 4½ miles (7.2 km) east of the town of Tehachapi, at an elevation of 3,966 feet (1,209 m) in the southern Sierra Nevada and eastern Tehachapi Pass areas.
The story of the Monolith Portland Cement plant begins around the turn of the Twentieth Century when the Los Angeles Board of Public Works set out to supplement its water supply from beyond the Los Angeles basin. By 1906 the City had secured a deed to water from the Owens Valley on the eastern side of the Sierra and began development of a facility to convey the water to L.A. The construction of a cement plant at Monolith was one of the first aspects of the project undertaken by the City. Why Monolith? In addition to its plentiful supply of limestone and clay (needed to make the high-grade cement to be used to construct the aqueducts to carry the water), Monolith was also situated near the geographic center of the proposed transmission site and, conveniently, one of California's major rail lines – the Southern Pacific Railroad.
The plant was finished in 1908 and operated continuously until 1914, when the L.A. water project was completed and the mill shut down. In 1920 the property was leased to a partnership called the U.S. Potash Company. In June 1921 it was renamed the Monolith Portland Cement Company.
For the next half-century Monolith Portland Cement met the demands of a booming Los Angeles and the rapidly swelling contours of southern California. The architecture of the region still bears traces of the company's goods. Many of the Spanish style homes and businesses in Beverly Hills and Hollywood (built in the '20s) utilized Monolith stucco; the L.A. County Hospital -- a monument to the city -- was constructed from Monolith cements.
In 1941, at the onset of WWII, the U.S. government laid claim to Monolith Portland Cement's raw materials and built the enormous U.S. Naval Ammunition Dump in Hawthorne, Nevada. From 1942 until the end of the war much of the company's output went into construction of a naval base on Guam Island. In the '50s and '60s, Monolith Portland Cement expanded and modernized its facilities, fulfilling southern California's ever-growing highway, utility and building needs.
In the early '80s, the Calaveras Cement Company purchased the property and replaced the original factory (exhausted and worn out by this time) with the ultra-modern facility that operates in its place today.
Southern Pacific train 1-BACI-T-2-05 is heading south ("east" on the railroad) with six-and-a-half-year-old Cotton Belt GP60 9679 leading three (filthy) six-axle EMD diesels. (The Cotton Belt, the full name of which was St. Louis Southwestern, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the much larger Southern Pacific.)
