HAMLET — A Richmond County corporation is lending a hand — and several hundred tons of rock — to the ongoing City Lake beautification project.
City Manager Jonathan Blanton announced Friday that Vulcan Materials Company has donated 450 tons of rip-rap stone to go along the banks of the lake. The city is purchasing an additional 350 tons in a two-to-one matching grant.
The football-sized stones will be used “in order to promote a fresh, clean, and neat looking shoreline.”
City workers were hauling the stones all day Friday back and forth from the quarry to the lake.
Blanton said he reached out to the Birmingham, Alabama-based company, which has a quarry near Cordova, about helping out with the project and the agreement was recently reached.
“It’s incredibly generous of them,” he said.
Vulcan is a supplier and distributor of construction materials including gravel, sand and crushed stone, for use in building bridges, parking lots, roads, airport runways, houses, apartments, schools, commercial buildings and more, according to its website.
Blanton said he hopes this phase of the project will be complete by the end of Monday.
“(T)he City of Hamlet is immensely grateful for the support of Vulcan Materials as we continue to make the City Lake one of the most beautiful places in Richmond County,” he said.
Renovations at City Lake began three weeks ago with the removal of overgrowth and dead and rotting trees.
Blanton said one of the biggest arguments for cleaning up around the lake was public safety.
Since cleanup began, a man’s body was found at the lake and Blanton reported a man with an open container on Tuesday who wound up being an attempted-murder suspect in Scotland County.
The next step, also related to public safety, related to public safety is the installation of LED lighting around the park and trails, Blanton said. He is slated to meet with representatives from Duke Energy next week.
Other improvements include planting centipede grass, replacing the sprinkler system and having a mural painted.
