For Barbara McGowan, the pandemic opened the door to a career she loves.
The single Spotsylvania mom had been cutting hair in her mother’s barbershop for 10 years.
“My mother was a barber for 25 years and she tried to pass that along, but I never really liked cutting hair,” McGowan says. “I liked doing construction. I liked being outside.”
When COVID slowed the barber business, she “took that as a chance to jump out and do what I wanted to do,” signing up for the Heavy Equipment Operator program at Germanna’s Fredericksburg Center for Advanced Technology. She practiced there with virtual reality technology which allowed her to learn how to operate all kinds of heavy equipment. It led to an apprenticeship at the Cedar Mountain Stone Quarry in Mitchell’s, near Culpeper. And that led to a full-time job there as the first-ever woman to work in the pit at the quarry. The tall, blonde woman drives a loader that dumps granite into 40-ton trucks.
“With no experience,” she says, “it’s hard to walk up to somebody and say, ‘Hey, I’ve been a barber for 10 years. Can I go ahead and take your loader out?’ People would look at you a little funny. But when you know what you want to do, you just have to find a way, and that program Germanna offers definitely helps. It gave me a background. I wasn’t just somebody with no experience.”
In spite of being the first woman to work in the pit, McGowan says she’s been treated with respect.
“You definitely get a few heads turning when you’re driving by” people who were unaware, she says, but she’s been accepted.
Carl Carter, the superintendent of Cedar Mountain Stone at Mitchell’s has been in the construction industry for 35 years, building highways, roads, and parking lots. He says McGowan is the first woman he’s seen work “on heavy equipment in a quarry, where it’s a lot more condensed and a lot more traffic—and she’s learned how to use multiple pieces of equipment and handled it well in a very stressful situation.”
Her advice to other women considering nontraditional jobs: “Don’t be scared. We’re good at anything we put our minds to.”
"Don’t be scared. We’re good at anything we put our minds to."
- Barbara McGowan, Germanna grad and Heavy Equipment Operator
Tom Locher, Equipment & Safety Manager at Cedar Mountain Stone, says: “We currently have five [workers] in the apprenticeship program with Germanna… It’s a great partnership. We have individuals that can come work for us, work full time, 100 percent of their tuition covered, with full-time benefits, and at the end of the process, they have an associate’s degree.”
Ed Dalrymple, president of Chemung Contracting Corporation, Dalrymple Holding Corporation, and Cedar Mountain Stone Corporation, says: “We see the potential for her to be a leader and intend to continue her training at Germanna to become a certified mine foreman. Barb looks at her work for Cedar Mountain Stone as a way to support her family and build her future.”
McGowan says: “People might find a woman doing a different kind of job a little strange, but you can do anything you put your mind to. Don’t be afraid to get out there and break the norms. There is no normal. You are your own normal.”
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