Since the end of 2003, Italian stone producer Nikolaus Bagnara S.p.A. has owned the Silver Cloud granite quarry in Lithonia, GA. The site, which did not start producing dimensional stone until the late 1980s, sits approximately 20 miles outside of Atlanta, and is operated by Nikolaus Bagnara’s U.S. subsidiary, Broad River Quarries, LLC.

The Silver Cloud quarry has a checkered history. From the beginning of the 1990s until the new millennium, the quarry was operated by several different companies, and the production was always very limited, according to Armin Kompatscher of Nikolaus Bagnara S.p.A. During the mid-1990s, several other quarries in the area began producing the same material, and they all began to export their products.