When Hitchcock died, however, interest in the tracks faded. A year after his death, the Civil War ended, people began to move west, and they discovered hordes of dinosaur fossils. Hitchcock’s tracks could not compete with the bones of Tyrannosaurus rex, Stegosaurus, and Triceratops. But in the 1970s and 1980s, paleontologists returned to the tracks. They began to ask new questions about dinosaur behavior.
Unlike bones, which tell the story of death, tracks record the action of a living animal. Tracks show young and old dinosaurs of the same species traveling together, different species visiting the same shoreline on the same day, and dinosaurs following each other. “In the 1950s we thought that dinosaurs were sluggish, solitary creatures that dragged their tails around behind them,” said Sauter. “And now we think of them as athletic and birdlike. They were particularly vicious, and fast runners and jumpers. We found out all this information from these slabs. These actual slabs. It was really a revolution of thinking.”
“All the right things came together at the right time for brownstone,” said Alison Guinness, whose interest in the rock began when her master’s thesis adviser at Wesleyan University received a grant to study the Portland quarry. “It was easy to transport. There were a large number of workers available. Demand was growing, the rock was easy to quarry, and there was a lot of it.”19
During three centuries of quarrying in Portland, workers extracted more than 270 million cubic feet of rock, or enough material to build three copies of the Great Pyramid of Giza.20 It was shipped up and down the East Coast, overland to Chicago, and around Cape Horn to San Francisco. “Brownstone was so important to the local economy that they even moved a cemetery to get at the rock,” Guinness said, standing next to the old quarry in Portland.
She knows the history of these quarries better than anyone. When she began studying them, they had been forgotten and abandoned for years. “They were languishing. They had filled with water and people dumped cars in them,” said Guinness. “I quickly learned, however, that these quarries were the ultimate site that shaped the entire brownstone industry.”
In 1686 James Stancliff became the first person to settle on the east side of the Connecticut River in what is now Portland. The selectmen of Middletown, located on the west shore of the river, had given him the land called The Rocks so he could harvest stone to build chimneys and cut gravestones. Stancliff’s sons also joined the business, which they later sold to another family of gravestone cutters, led by Thomas Johnson. Their tombstones were the first Portland stone to be exported widely and show up in cemeteries as far away as Newport, Rhode Island.
Guinness noted that Stancliff was not the first person to recognize the importance of the rocks that outcropped next to the Connecticut River. After Middletown’s settlement in 1650, locals had used the stone for foundations, steps, and walls. Town residents probably didn’t quarry the rock but simply pried the stone from ledges along the water and carried it away in carts and scows, said Guinness. As so often happens, word got out and non-Middletownians began to arrive at The Rocks with their own picks, carts, and watercraft to remove stone.
Responding to such effrontery, the fine citizens of Middletown voted on September 4, 1665, “that whosoever shall dig or raise stone at ye rocks on the East side of the Great River . . . the diggers shall be none but an inhabitant of Middletown and shall be responsible to ye town twelve pence per tunn . . . to be paid in wheat and pease . . .”21
The high value of grain and green vegetables seems to have quelled the stone stealers. Locals resumed collecting rock and felt so magnanimous with their bounty that they gave Stancliff his one-third acre at The Rocks. Ten years later Stancliff obtained another half acre, but by 1715 Middletownians were worried again. This time they banned even locals from collecting stone and transporting it out of town. Scofflaws had to fork out twenty shillings per stone. Concerned townsfolk also appointed a quarry agent to enforce the rules at what was now known as the Town Quarry.
This round of posturing didn’t last long. Using his skills as a gravestone cutter, Thomas Johnson quarried enough stone in 1737 to provide brownstone accents for a granite house in Boston for Thomas Hancock, John’s uncle. Other rock began to make its way down to New York and Newport for architectural trimmings, but quarrying stayed small scale because little demand existed and transportation was challenging.
Quarrying in the early 1700s was still a crude affair. If they didn’t collect rock from the surface, workers blasted it out with black powder or knocked it off with an ax. They were aided by how the sandstone formed. During the monsoon seasons 200 million years ago, the rivers would flood and overflow their banks, each time depositing a sheet, or bed, of sand as thick as five feet or as thin as half an inch. Bedding created a flat surface ideal for building blocks. Quarrymen also took advantage of bedding because the contact zone between beds is weak—relative to the surrounding rocks—and is easier to pry apart. Furthermore, floods often deposited nearly pure beds of the same-sized sediments, which made the Portland rocks homogenous and easy to work.22 These beds are clearly visible in the walls of the Portland quarry. The most useful extend for hundreds of yards.
Earlier tectonic change also aided the quarrymen. As Pangaea continued to break up, tectonic forces pushed and pulled the valley. Tension was released by a series of cracks or joints, later known to quarrymen as keys, that tended to run at ninety-degree angles to the horizontal bedding. These seams and bedding created four workable faces. Masons needed only to cut two more faces to form a block. Subsequent generations of quarrymen exploited this geologic warp and weft on a much larger scale.
Commercial quarrying did not begin until the 1780s when several companies began working holes in and near James Stancliff’s original Portland site. By the 1820s three companies—Middlesex, Brainerd, and Shaler and Hall—had consolidated ownership of the quarrying business, although Middletown citizens could still take rock from the Town Quarry. The Middlesex and Brainerd pits opened near the public hole and next to each other, separated only by the Portland town cemetery. Shaler and Hall’s quarry sat just downriver.
The companies also controlled the town, said Guinness. Workers shopped at the company stores, using credit extended to them by the company. They lived in company housing and many prayed in a church built with stone provided by the companies.
The men worked from sunup to sundown with a midday break of one to two hours. Work stopped for bad weather, holidays, and haying. Guinness noted that “going to the poorhouse, drunkenness, and wife’s jollification” also led to missed days, or at least hours, depending upon the activity. Typical wages in the 1830s ranged between $11 and $18 per month. By the 1850s the three companies had conspired to set a standard pay rate, which was $1.10 per day in 1854. Wages peaked at a daily rate of $2.50 in 1870, sliding back to $1.55 in the nationwide depression that followed.
Prior to the use of steam engines, men and beasts did all the work. A full labor force topped out in the 1850s with between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred men, 60 span of horses, and 120 yoke of oxen. Surveyors determined where to quarry. Rock bosses supervised a crew of blasters, cutters, and haulers. Teamsters controlled the oxen and horses that moved the stone within and out of the quarry. Measurers ensured the size of each stone that left the quarry, and blacksmiths tended wagon wheels, picks, drills, and other iron and steel implements. All the while, a diligent timekeeper tracked the comings and goings of the men.
After 1850 the workforce began to shrink, a consequence of quarry owners adopting new technology as soon as it became available, said Guinness. Pumps allowed the quarries to drop below river level by removing excess water. Steam-powered derricks could more easily remove rock from the depths than could animal-powered carts. Derricks also raised and lowered men and oxen. New motorized tools such as jackhammers required fewer men to operate them, while three miles of narrow gauge railroad track and several locomotives made moving stone and cranes less labor intensive. By 1896 only two yoke of oxen remain
ed and about half the number of workers as had been employed in the 1850s.
After the stone had been cut, quarrymen loaded blocks onto shallow-draft schooners called stone boats, or brownstoners, for the thirty-mile trip south on the Connecticut River to Long Island Sound. Towed down-river by steamboat, stone boats reverted to wind power in the sound. A typical trip on the Connecticut River took eight to twelve hours.
Weather controlled the work season, which started after the thaw. Because the quarries spread out next to the river, spring flooding could also dictate when the men worked. For example, on May 4, 1854, the Connecticut River overflowed and completely filled the quarries. It took ten days to pump out the water. The season ended when boats could no longer travel on the iced-over river.
Cold weather also affected the stone. When first quarried, it was saturated with moisture, called sap by quarrymen, which could destroy a rock in freezing weather. During summer and fall, quarrymen seasoned the blocks by covering them with soil and letting them dry for four months. Seasoning case-hardened the stone by allowing dissolved calcite or silica to move with the sap to the surface, where the minerals deposited a new, stronger coating. In later years, during the height of brownstone popularity, demand was so great that quarrymen didn’t have time to let the rocks season, which resulted in poor quality stones that helped ruin brownstone’s reputation.
And good stone was key. Of the ten million cubic yards of rock removed from the quarries about half was waste, dumped outside the quarry. The quarries annually generated up to two million cubic feet of rock during peak production years, equally divided between high-quality stone, including unseasoned rock, and stone used for nonarchitectural purposes, such as abutments and piers.
Oddly, no stone quarried in Portland was cut and trimmed in town, except for local projects. Most stone was shipped raw to New Jersey or New York for cutting and dressing until 1884 when E. I. Bell established the Connecticut Steam Brown Stone Company, where masons used diamond saws, gang saws, planers, lathes, and a rubbing bed to slice, carve, and finish everything from entablatures to steps to balustrades.
The adjacent Brainerd and Middlesex pits eventually reached down two hundred feet. They became one big hole in the 1870s when the companies purchased the Portland town cemetery, which formed a hundred-foot-high ridge between the quarries. The graves and gravestones—the oldest stone dates from 1712—were moved and now rest a couple miles away at the Episcopal church. All that remains of the ridge is a low, tree-covered peninsula that extends out into the lake that fills the quarry.
Bad weather finally killed Portland’s quarrying industry, which had been on the decline since the early 1900s and silent since the 1920s. In 1936 record high water on the Connecticut River flooded the pits. Two years later, a hurricane helped push the river back into the quarries, which have remained flooded ever since. A local company now has the rights to lead diving tours into the quarry lake, which is about 600 yards long by 350 yards wide. Guinness has heard rumors that two train engines might be in the hole, but no one knows all that rests on the bottom of the quarry. In recent years, cleanup crews have removed forty tons of trash, including eight motorcycles, four cars, and sixteen air conditioners, but no trains.
The water-filled quarry now sits a couple hundred feet from the edge of the Connecticut River. Originally the holes were adjacent to the river but quarrymen had simply dumped waste over the western edge of the quarry and created a landfill. Massive baby blue oil tanks and a parking lot guarded by a pair of Rottweilers take up much of the new land. Sumacs, sycamores, and locusts grow on the cliffs above the quarry, their russet, yellow, and red leaves complementing the blue water and brown sandstone.
Few people thought much about the quarries until the mid-1980s, when developers wanted to cut a channel to the river and open a marina in the lake. They would have been successful except the bottom dropped out of the real estate market and the developers went bankrupt, said Guinness. With her prompting, the city of Portland finally bought the three quarries and adjacent land in 1999 and 2000. They plan on developing the site with trails, educational exhibits, and recreational uses. In April 2000 Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt designated the quarries as a National Historic Landmark.
Site of Middlesex and Brainerd quarry,
now flooded, in Portland, Connecticut.
New Yorkers didn’t initially care for brownstone, using it only for building details. For example, the city’s oldest church, St. Paul’s, built in 1766, is made of 450-million-year-old Manhattan Schist with brownstone quoins, a patio, and columns. The earliest known wall of solid brownstone is part of City Hall (1803–1812), located just north of the financial district. A guidebook published at the time called it “the most prominent and most important building in New-York. It is the handsomest structure in the United States; perhaps of its size, in the world.”23 Hyperbole aside, City Hall is an elegant edifice with a columned entryway, broad stairs, and a slender dome with a skin of white marble from Massachusetts. The builders also used marble on the south, east, and west exterior walls. On the north side, however, the exterior was brownstone, used because no one, or at least no one of any importance, lived north of the building. Those who did either wouldn’t know any better or wouldn’t mind looking at what builders considered to be a cheap substitute for more classically correct marble and limestone.24
As Alain de Botton noted in The Architecture of Happiness, for over one thousand years “a beautiful building was synonymous with a Classical building, a structure with a temple front, decorated columns, repeated ratios and a symmetrical façade.”25 Classical architecture began with the Greeks, continued with the Romans, and, following a thousand-year hiatus, reemerged during the Renaissance. The stones of choice for most of the great buildings of antiquity and the Renaissance were marble and a type of limestone known as travertine. How could an architect turn against such a simple equation of beauty?
In New York City in the early to middle 1800s, few architects bucked the tradition. Instead, the change came from laypeople. When Richard Upjohn proposed limestone for Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, the congregants chose brownstone. Completed in 1846, Trinity Church was the first important building with solid brownstone walls.26 Charles Lockwood, in Bricks and Brownstone, argued that the wealthy, well-read members of the church chose the somber stone because they were at the forefront of the rising Romantic movement, best exemplified by the writings of Andrew Jackson Downing, a nurseryman and one of America’s first landscape designers.
Downing’s most influential book was The Architecture of Country Houses, published in 1850. “No person of taste, who gives the subject the least consideration, is, however, guilty of the mistake of painting or coloring country houses white . . . In buildings, we should copy those [colors] that she [nature] offers chiefly to the eye—such as those of the soil, rocks, wood, and the bark of trees . . .”27 Downing died in 1852, but his influence continued with his architectural collaborator Calvert Vaux and with Vaux’s design partner, Frederick Law Olmsted, codesigner with Vaux of New York’s Central Park. The development of gas lighting further enhanced brownstone’s reputation because the stone masked the soot produced by gas and coal.
During the 1850s a brownstone fog began to creep across New York. It spread northward through Manhattan as the city grew. It swelled across Brooklyn as the borough became a fashionable suburb. It responded to fashion, changing from Greek Revival to Gothic to Italianate. It responded to money, initially facing row houses and later covering mansions.
Many quarries in addition to Portland opened in response to the growing popularity of brownstone. Most were in the great rift valleys formed during the splitting apart of North America and Africa. Five companies quarried in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, quarries supplied stone across the state and down to Baltimore. Quarries in northern New Jersey, primarily along the Passaic River in Little Falls, Paterson, and Belleville, provided stone for many institutional buil
dings in Manhattan, including Trinity Church. All of these quarries produced a rusty red sandstone, sold as brownstone, but none sold as much rock as the quarry in Portland.
The march of brownstone-fronted row houses coincided with a tripling of New York’s population between 1840 and 1870, from three hundred thousand to nine hundred thousand. It also overlapped with the growth of an emerging middle class, who wanted to show their prosperity—and a brownstone perfectly served that purpose. For those who couldn’t afford an entire building, which included many since the structures were so big, they could rent a floor and assume the guise of wealth. Those on the outside looking in wouldn’t know if a resident lived on one or many floors.
If cost was no object, brownstone, especially from Portland, was the stone of choice for mansions, as well. In 1854 sarsaparilla king Samuel Townsend erected a four-story cube of brownstone, for some years the largest private residence in Manhattan. When George Pullman built his mansion in Chicago, he imported Portland brownstone, even though he could have used a brown sandstone from Ohio.28 The only building on Nob Hill to survive San Francisco’s 1906 quake was “Silver King” James Flood’s brownstone mansion, built between 1884 and 1886 from Portland brownstone. The stone had been shipped as ballast around Cape Horn and was used to construct the 107-foot-by-127-foot residence, featuring fourteen solid stone columns, each thirteen feet tall by twenty-two inches square, and twenty-three-foot-long sandstone steps. The biggest blocks each weighed eighteen tons.29
Lewis Mumford termed this period the Brown Decades. He wrote in 1931 that “the Civil War shook down the blossoms and blasted the promise of spring. The colours of American civilization abruptly changed. By the time the war was over, browns had spread everywhere: mediocre drabs, dingy chocolate browns, sooty browns that merged into black. Autumn had come.” Brown was a sign of “renounced ambitions, defeated hopes.”30 Like earlier critics, Mumford specifically bemoaned the East Coast’s chocolate-colored sandstone.
Stories in Stone Page 3