1907 to supply $500,000 worth of marble for the Cuyahoga County Court House, in Cleveland, Ohio, and set off a quarrying boom. In spite of the increased quarrying, by 1913 the company was in financial trouble due to the huge start-up debt and high operating costs not generating enough revenue to pay down the debt. A loan of $1,868,000 was obtained in early February 1913 and used to refinance to debt. In spite of the financial difficulty orders kept coming in with the first contract of one million dollars for the Equitable Building, New York City, in August 1913 for of marble. As the quarry boomed, so did the town reaching its population peak from 1912 through 1914 of 1,400 to 1,500 residents, including a large number of skilled Italian marble worker immigrants with most of them in the mill site. There were two newspapers, three hotels, movie theater, ice cream parlor, five ice houses, and nine stables among other businesses. In January 1910, a movie was premiered in Marble, Bear Hunt in the Rockies by Edwin Stanton Porter, director of the 1903 landmark movie The Great Train Robbery. Lincoln Memorial: March 1914 to June 1916 Selecting the marble for the exterior was a competitive process with five samples submitted to the Lincoln Memorial Commission for consideration; three from Georgia (Cherokee, Southern and Amicalola), one from Vermont (Dorset White) and Yule marble. Of the samples, Memorial architect Henry Bacon wanted to use Yule marble in spite of its higher cost because the stones "whiteness and delicate veining" placed it "above any white building marble in appearance that I have seen here or abroad". The Memorial commission voted to award the marble contract for Yule marble on 26 September 1913 but the matter was not settled. Other bidders raised objections about Yule quality, ability to quarry the needed quantity and its durability. Colonel W. W. Harts, the US Army Engineer Officer in charge of Public Grounds and overseer of the project, commissioned geologist George Perkins Merrill to make a determination. After visiting the quarry, Merrill concluded Yule marble met the needed requirements. Yet Secretary of War Lindsley Garrison called for testing by Bureau of Standards which gave a positive report on the use of Yule marble. He also sent a 17 January 1914 letter to United States Commission of Fine Arts about the use of Yule marble, and a reply was