Stories in Stone

by David B. Williams

  Military engineers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries based their designs on siege warfare, where the defenders hunkered down in their fort and the attackers attempted to get inside. Success depended on cutting off supplies to the hunkerers, destroying the fort’s weapons, particularly cannons, and breaching or scaling the walls. Sieges could take months and result in demoralizing losses for the attackers. “Frederick the Great normally had casualties of fifty-five to sixty-five percent in a siege. There just weren’t enough people in Florida to make a good siege,” said Brehm.

  With a design in place, Daza began to supervise work on the castillo.26 Although illness weakened the Indian peons and forced Governor Cendoya and his soldiers to man the shovels, the north, south, and east walls began to rise. By early 1673, the east wall and two bastions stood eleven feet high. Then Cendoya and Daza died within days of each other, the viceroy in Mexico refused to send money until ordered by Spain, and a storm breached the stone walls and wrecked the old wood fort. Construction also slowed because a ship carrying provisions foundered and workers had to go in search of food.

  Despite the challenges, the fort grew. In May 1675, when a new governor, Pablo de Hita Salazar arrived—with food, too—the south wall and southeast bastion were up to a height of twelve feet, the north wall and northeast bastion to twenty feet, and the east wall to fifteen feet. The walls were thirteen feet thick at the base, tapering to nine feet at the top. Recognizing that he needed a defensible fort, Hita decided to erect a temporary, twelve-foot-high wall of dirt,wood, and stone veneer on the west side between the half completed northwest and southwest bastions. He also finished the three other curtain walls and seaward bastions, and mounted cannons on the triangular structures. St. Augustine finally had its first real fort.

  In a report back to Spain, the governor wrote of the castillo that “in the form of its plan this one is not surpassed by any of those of greater character.” He also observed how little food and money he had to provide his workers. “If it had to be built in another place than St. Augustine it would cost a double amount . . .”27

  Governor Hita could make this observation because of the international—that is, mostly subjugated—nature of the workers. Guale, Timucua, and Apalache natives joined Spanish peons, African slaves, Caribbean convicts, and English prisoners, along with Cuban and Mexican mestizos and St. Augustinian creoles. Wages ranged from zero pay and limited rations for slaves and convicts through one real (twenty cents) per day and rations for Indians, to twenty reales for the master mason. There was room for advancement: English prisoner John Collins worked his way up to master of the kilns and eventually to quarrymaster.

  Hita’s initial enthusiasm notwithstanding, fort construction halted on December 31, 1677. The viceroy’s parsimony left no money to pay workers; during the last months of 1677, work continued only because of gifts from town residents. Work did not begin again until August 29, 1679. Ever so slowly the walls of the castillo rose, with periodic fixes on older sections that had been poorly or incorrectly built.

  The castillo’s first test came in spring 1683 when 230 pirates landed at Ponce de Leon inlet, sixty miles south of St. Augustine, and began to march north. They easily overpowered a watchtower on the south end of Anastasia Island, but when they reached the north end of the island the pirates realized the stone fort meant that taking the town would no longer be as easy as it had been. As Moore would do nineteen years later, they abandoned their nefarious plans and decided to retreat.

  Flushed, or perhaps shocked, with St. Augustine’s first victory, the castillo crews pushed harder to finish and by 1685 all interior work was done. This included the interior courtyard, now surrounded by more than twenty rooms with wood support beams and a tabby (oyster shells and mortar) slab roof.28 All that remained was finishing the ravelin, the moat, the covered way, and the glacis. Without these critical defensive outworks, the fort was still vulnerable to a siege attack. Furthermore, the wood-beamed rooms could not support the heavy cannons, which could be used only on the thick, coquina-walled bastions.

  International politics again affected St. Augustine. Taking time out from working on the fort, the Spanish tried to crush the recently established colony of Charles Town, but a storm stopped them. They also had to battle English advances in western Florida and Georgia. And then Spain declared war on France, which gave French corsairs more reason to attack Spanish supply ships bringing food to St. Augustine. Food became so scarce that officials decided to plant corn on the glacis surrounding the castillo.

  Finally in August 1695, the castillo and its outer defensive works, except the ravelin, were completed. Plastered a brilliant white with red watchtower and garitas, little towers at the corner of each bastion, the castillo had cost 138,750 pesos, about double what Governor Cendoya had estimated in 1672. Seven years later, the new fort proved its worth during the defeat of Moore.

  Completion of the castillo and Moore’s razing of the town created the market for coquina during St. Augustine’s second phase of urban renewal. Residents, at least the wealthier ones, used coquina for houses, wells, and garden walls. The Catholic Church also chose coquina, as did the Spanish government for their official buildings.

  Despite the Spanish word, no Spaniards used the term coquina to describe their building stone. They preferred piedra (stone), canto (quarry stone), canteria (hewn stone), or mamposteria (stone masonry). When the English took control of St. Augustine in 1763, they called the coquina “stone” or “shellstone.” The earliest known reference to coquina is from 1819. Not until the late 1830s did the term start to catch on.

  Some early visitors to St. Augustine didn’t dignify coquina with the term “stone.” An English traveler in 1817 wrote, “This marine substance is superior to stone, not being liable to splinter from the effects of bombardment.”29 In 1831 John James Audubon wrote to his wife “an old Spanish Castle . . . is built of . . . a concrete of shells which hardens by exposure to the Air and is curious to the Geologist.”30

  The modern town of St. Augustine has recognized the importance of coquina to its past and has worked extensively on preservation, restoration, and upkeep of its historic structures. It has also attempted to keep the spirit of the Spanish architecture, at least downtown, with narrow streets overhung with second-story balconies. Unfortunately, many merchants seem to miss the point and use the historic aura as a means to sell cheesy tchotchkes.

  Anastasia Island remained the primary source for quarries. They spread in a narrow band along the center of the island. None were large and none were deep. The Spanish government owned the quarries and controlled all access. Except for the years 1763 to 1783, Spain retained ownership of the quarries until 1821, when the U.S. government acquired Florida. It also acquired the quarries and surrounding land, which is how the land now run as Anastasia State Park stayed protected and undeveloped.

  Thirty-eight years after Moore’s failure, the British tried another attack on St. Augustine and the castillo. On June 13, 1740, fourteen hundred men under the command of Georgia governor James Oglethorpe began to bombard the fort. They were better prepared with more men, bigger guns, and mortars, hollow shells lobbed high to explode over or on the grounds of the fort (Francis Scott Key’s “bombs bursting in air”). The coquina withstood the onslaught, leading one British soldier to express “[it] will not splinter but will give way to cannon ball as though you would stick a knife into cheese.”31 Oglethorpe and his men retreated on July 16.

  With peace at hand, the Spanish began to beef up their defenses. They built a new coquina structure, Fort Matanzas, at the south inlet to the Matanzas River. They rebuilt the coquina wall of the covered way; remodeled and finished the four defensive lines that formed successive walls around St. Augustine; and expanded and converted the rooms surrounding the castillo’s courtyard by replacing the wood beams with coquina and tabby vaulted ceilings, which shrank the courtyard by fifty feet and raised the castillo’s walls five feet to thirty feet above the moat botto
m. For the first time, the Spanish could place cannons anywhere along the fort’s walls, not just atop the corner bastions. By 1762 all except the ravelin was done, including a new coat of plaster.

  Ironically, a year later the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years’ War in Europe, ended with victory for England, which acquired Canada from France and Florida from Spain. St. Augustine and the castillo, now called Fort St. Mark, transferred to British control on July 21, 1763. The town became a British haven: the only one of the colonies to support the British during the Revolutionary War.32 Twenty years later Florida reverted back to Spain as part of the treaties signed in Paris marking the end of the American Revolution.

  Daily life in St. Augustine continued to be a struggle with limited food (commonly eaten items were mullet, catfish, and gopher tortoise) and delayed subsidies from Spain, although new governors would arrive and bring energy for construction and increased trade and the town would prosper.33 One big change from the seventeenth century, however, was that Augustinians now knew that their little town was permanent; they could always depend on the castillo as their fortress, not only as a deterrent but also as a refuge. St. Augustine also started to get what might be called its first tourists.

  “Augustin itself is widely known to be a healthy place, so that weaklings and consumptives from the northern provinces resort hither, and always to their advantage,” wrote German botanist and explorer Johann David Schoepf.34 Schoepf made his observation during travels in Florida in the early 1780s. Time, however, did not treat the town well. When John James Audubon visited in 1831, ten years after the United States acquired Florida, he wrote, “St. Augustine is the poorest hole in the Creation.”35 The castillo, or Fort Marion, as the Americans named it, must have impressed him because he used it as the backdrop for his painting of the Greenshank, even though he shot the bird at the southern tip of Florida.36

  Although no shots flew, the South (1861–62) and the North (1862–65) each controlled the fort during the Civil War. After fighting ceased, Fort Marion served as a prison for Great Plains and Apache Indians. The grounds later became Florida’s first golf course, when Henry Flagler, cofounder of Standard Oil, built his stunning Hotel Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine. The former hotel, now Flagler College, was the first large-scale building constructed entirely of poured concrete; the walls look like coquina because the builders used crushed coquina as an aggregate.

  Flagler also built a railroad to town and began to promote St. Augustine as a tourist destination. The quiet hamlet became the “Newport of Florida,” as Harriet Beecher Stowe described it.37 Visitors could buy coquina carvings and painted coquina from the “Coquina Man.” The St. Augustine Historical Society offered tours of the castillo. Because the guides depended on tips, the stories became more fanciful with a torture rack, quicksand pit, and secret dungeon taking over where truth ended.

  The arrival of Flagler’s railroad had another consequence. Now that the railroad could bring any stone builders wanted, coquina faded as a building material, not to reappear again until Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal projects, which emphasized the use of local materials. In St. Augustine, the New Deal led to construction of a civic center and a large hotel. Daytona Beach also incorporated coquina in two magnificent structures: a band-shell, now hidden by beachside condos and hotels, and the Tarragona Arch, which on the day I visited was decorated with Christmas lights outlining a motorcycle-riding Santa.

  Only one quarry now supplies coquina. Located about four miles west of St. Augustine, it is deeper than the surface deposits of Anastasia Island. Owner Gary Wilson says that he supplies stone for statues such as dolphins and turtles, and veneer for new developments. Clients have included two people one might not suspect of sharing a common interest: actor Burt Reynolds ordered a carved Brahma bull and golfer Vijay Singh wanted coquina veneer for his home and guesthouse. Coquina truly does bring the world together.38

  Wilson also supplies stone to the castillo. Over the past few years, the park service has been engaged in a multifaceted restoration process. Workers have experimented with chemical methods to prevent plant growth on the coquina. They have rebuilt sections of the covered way stone walls and resurfaced the roof on top of the courtyard rooms to prevent water damage, although water seepage continues to produce stalactites in some rooms. Park employees are also using Wilson’s coquina to stabilize horizontal surfaces in the fort.

  Although most of these restoration projects focus on preventing water damage, the park service has no plans to do the one thing that would best protect the fort and make it historically more accurate. They will not re-plaster the building and restore the historic white and red colors. They claim that people would complain because they are used to the gray color of the castillo. There is probably another reason. They just don’t want to cover up the clams.

  6

  AMERICA’S BUILDING STONE—

  INDIANA LIMESTONE

  “We have under our feet the best building material God ever put

  on Earth. Because of that fact, this industry is as nearly eternal as you can get. One hundred years from now, people will still be hauling limestone out of this little patch of ground. They may be shipping it on spaceships and light rays, but one way or another they’ll be hauling it out of the ground and stacking it into the air.”

  —Bill McDonald, as quoted in In Limestone Country,

  Scott Russell Sanders

  I cut the stone for this building . . . I was proud of my work. When they were finished the darndest thing happened. It was like the buildings were too good for us. Nobody told us that . . . it just felt uncomfortable.

  —Mr. Stoller, in the film Breaking Away

  IN SEPTEMBER 2007 I went in search of limestone. My destination was Bloomington, Indiana, the heart of a region where limestone has been quarried for almost two hundred years. The stone was everywhere. Green slate topped a few of the walls but basically every rock was gray or buff limestone. The highest rose sixty or seventy feet, smooth and cool to the touch. Black lichens covered the north sides of these clifflike faces and were especially prominent in areas where water had trickled down. Other walls made of broken slabs of limestone reached only as high as my waist. On one an untidy line of flagstones stood perpendicular to the horizontal slabs, looking like an upside-down photo of James Hutton’s famous unconformity at Siccar Point. At the base of the slabs, moss and ferns pushed out of crevices and added a beautiful verdant contrast to the buff blocks. Towering above this low wall were oaks and maples with a dozen red admiral and question mark butterflies sipping sap from the trunk of one oak.

  On another block of limestone someone had carved an intricate pattern of vines and leaves. Whoever made the design used a narrow chisel, its cutting grooves still visible in the soft stone. Nearby the date 1890 had been chiseled eight inches high. The numbers were remarkably crisp and sharp considering the area’s classic rock-unfriendly climate of hot, humid summers and freezing winters, which typically ravage limestone.

  Walking away from one high wall of rock, I followed a leaf-covered path through a wooded area of beeches and maples to a grassy field and a low arch of smooth limestone. When I got closer, I noticed fossils crowded together in several blocks of rough stone on either side of the opening. Afternoon light hit the fossils obliquely and they stood out from the softer substrate like minute tombstones. This graveyard of invertebrates entombed brachiopods, one-to two-inch-wide, clamlike shells; crinoids, consisting of a cuplike calyx and thin ridged discs, some stacked five or ten high; and bryozoans, which resemble broken bits of Rice Chex cereal.

  Close-up of Salem Limestone, Maxwell Hall (1894),

  Indiana University campus, Bloomington, Indiana.

  Brian Keith, a geologist with the Indiana Geological Survey, calls these three animals the “holy trinity” of the Mississippian Period.1 Brachiopods, bryozoans, and crinoids were some of the most abundant invertebrates living from 354 to 320 million years ago, when a shallow, warm sea co
vered much of what we now call the Midwest and deposited the limestone. With a 10 hand lens, I could see that the wall of fossils was completely made of shells, most of which had broken into pieces in the fast moving tides that daily swept the ancient sea.

  Although I would have liked to smash off a sample of this fossiliferous rock and take it home with me, I knew I couldn’t because I was not in a wilderness or a semiwild spot. I was on the Indiana University (IU) campus in Bloomington and I was sure that the Hoosier faithful would look askance at someone, especially someone born in Kentucky, pecking away at one of the oldest buildings on campus.

  All but a few of the buildings on the IU campus, as well as many of the offices, banks, and government buildings in Bloomington, are made from the stone menagerie known variously as Bedford, Indiana, oolitic, or Salem limestone. The stone comes from a thirty-mile-long-by-five-mile-wide area called the Indiana building stone district. The Belt, as those in the trade call it, stretches northwest from Bedford to Stinesville, about ten miles northwest of Bloomington. Workers first used the stone in 1819, in the foundation and windowsills of the Monroe County Courthouse. The men hauled the blocks eight miles, ironically along an area later dotted with quarries and to a site resting upon extensive beds of limestone. The first quarry opened eight years later and builders have used Indiana limestone more or less continuously ever since.

  When you walk through Bloomington and Indiana University you are in the center of the Salem Limestone universe—builders in town tout limestone countertops instead of granite—but no matter where you are reading this book you do not have to travel far to find what Brian Keith describes as the “premier building stone in the country.” Salem Limestone may face your local government offices, make up the windowsills on a university campus, enclose the entryway to a bank, tower above as fluted columns in a courthouse, or accent the dark granite on a high-rise office building. As far as I have been able to determine, the Bedford rock is the only building stone used in all fifty states.