Stories in Stone

by David B. Williams

  Laurasia A supercontinent consisting of Siberia, Europe, North America, and parts of China.

  lintel A horizontal beam, often made of stone, spanning an opening, such as a window or door.

  magma Underground molten rock.

  mantle The seventeen-hundred-mile-thick layer between the earth’s crust and the core. Plates of the earth’s crust move along the mantle’s upper layer, called the asthenosphere.

  metamorphic A rock that has undergone a solid state change due to pressure and temperature.

  mica Any of a group of transparent, sheetlike minerals including biotite (clear) and muscovite (black).

  moraine Rocks and sediment transported and deposited by glacial action.

  mudstone A generic term for a rock consisting of grains generally less than 1.64 of an inch wide.

  nematode Mostly microscopic multicellular animals also known as roundworms.

  olivine An olive green mineral that solidifies at high temperatures.

  paleomagnetism Faint magnetic orientation of iron-rich magnetite crystals preserved within a rock. Used by geologists to ascertain the rock’s latitude at time of deposition or crystallization.

  Pangaea The great supercontinent made of all the continents. It existed between about 300 and 200 million years ago.

  pediment A low-pitched gable over a portico, window, doors, or façade.

  peridotite A very dark rock composed almost entirely of pyroxene and olivine. The mantle is primarily made of peridotite.

  planer A machine that smoothes and/or thins stone and other substances.

  plug A wedge inserted between two shims, or feathers, and hammered down into a hole to split rock.

  pluton A body of rock that has solidified within the earth.

  porphyry A rock with a texture consisting of larger grains set in a fine-grained matrix.

  portico A roofed space at the front of a building consisting of columns and a pediment.

  protozoa A single-celled animal, such as an amoeba, a paramecium, and giardia.

  pyroclastic A general term to describe material ejected violently from a volcano.

  quoins Dressed stones at the corner of a building.

  repoint To replace damaged mortar in a wall.

  rift valley A large-scale valley formed when a tectonic plate or plates begin to split apart.

  Rodinia A supercontinent made of all the continents, (though they did not look exactly as they do at present), which formed about 1,200 million years ago.

  sedimentary rock A rock formed by the deposition of sediment by wind,water, or ice; such rocks are usually layered or bedded.

  sleeper A piece of stone or wood that supports the rails of a railway.

  spall To break or split off.

  span of horses A pair of horses.

  stoop An uncovered platform that rises via stairs to the entrance of a house or other building.

  stucco A type of plaster made of lime, sand, and fine-grained material mixed with water.

  terrane A fault-bounded body of rock, with limited extent, characterized by a geologic history different than that of adjacent rocks.

  tonalite A type of igneous rock also known as quartz-diorite.

  veneer A thin surface coating on a building. It provides no structural support.

  voussoir A wedge-shaped stone forming one part of an arch.

  yoke of oxen A pair of oxen.

  NOTES

  1: “THE MOST HIDEOUS STONE EVER QUARRIED”

  1. Junius Henri Browne, Great Metropolis;A Mirror of New York (Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1869), 222.

  2. James Richardson, “The New Homes of New York: A Study of Flats,” Scribner's Monthly 8, no. 1 (1874): 67.

  3. Marianna G. van Rensselaer, “Recent Architecture in America V: City Dwellings,” Century Illustrated Magazine 31, no. 4 (1886): 550.

  4. Details on Vanderbilt, his money, and his building come from Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age (New York: Monacelli Press, 1999), 568–97.

  5. Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934), 55.

  6. Iron makes up about 3 percent of the rock, so it would not work to mine it.

  7. Browne, Great Metropolis, 222.

  8. Despite, or in spite of, its bad reputation, perhaps the most famous brownstone denizens of modern times moved into their basement apartment on November 10, 1969. As such, Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie were catalysts for reintroducing brownstones to the greater world. And who could be a better spokescurmudgeon for the stoop than Oscar the Grouch, who lived in his garbage can next to Bert and Ernie’s entryway.

  9. Alex Barrett, interview with author, New York,NY, October 23, 2006.

  10. The bones of Anchisaurus were the first dinosaur parts found in North America. Solomon Edwards discovered the bones in 1818 when digging a well in East Windsor, Connecticut. Dr. Nathan Smith, author of the first scientific description of the fossils, wrote, “Whether they are human or brute animal bones, it is an important fact as it relates to Geology.” “Fossil Bones found in red sand stone,” American Journal of Science 2, no. 1 (1820): 146–47. Nicholas G. McDonald designated these fossils as the first found in “Connecticut in the Age of Dinosaurs,” Rocks & Minerals 70 (1995): 412–18.

  11. There are numerous accounts of the Noah’s Raven discovery and its eventual acquisition by Hitchcock. The most thorough comes from Nancy Pick, Curious Footprints: Professor Hitchcock’s Dinosaur Tracks & Other Natural History Treasures at Amherst College (Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2006). Pick’s book also contains good information on Hitchcock and his life.

  12. Information on locations and habits of Anomoepus comes from Paul E. Olsen and Emma C. Rainforth, “The Early Jurassic Ornithischian Dinosaurian Ichnogenus Anomoepus” in The Great Rift Valleys of Pangea in Eastern North America: Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, and Paleontology vol. 2, edited by Peter M. Letourneau and Paul E. Olsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

  13. Steve Sauter, interview with author, Amherst, Massachusetts, October 26, 2006. I also based much of my description of Hitchcock on my conversation with Sauter.

  14. Pick, Curious Footprints, 6.

  15. Edward Hitchcock, “Ornithichnology. Description of the Foot Marks of Birds, (Ornithichnites) on new Red Sandstone in Massachusetts,” American Journal of Science and Arts 29, no. 2 (1836): 307–41.

  16. Edward Hitchcock, Reminiscences Of Amherst College, Historical, Scientific, Biographical and Autobiographical: Also, of Other and Wider Life Experiences, (Northampton, MA: Bridgman & Childs, 1863), 84.

  17. Ibid., 85.

  18. Hitchcock used the phrase “gem of the Cabinet” for a species he called Brontozoum Sillimanium in Ichnology of New England (Boston: William White, 1858), 68.

  19. Alison Guinness, interview with author, Portland, Connecticut, October 24, 2006.

  20. Many of the statistics and quotes on the history of brownstone come from two papers by Alison Guinness. Alison Guinness,“Heart of Stone: The Brownstone Industry of Portland, Connecticut,” in The Great Rift Valleys of Pangea, 224–47. Alison Guinness, “The Portland Brownstone Quarries,” The Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association, Inc. 55, no. 3 (2002): 95–112.

  21. J. S. Bayne, Town of Portland: History of Middlesex County, Connecticut (New York: J. B. Beers & Co., 1884), 516.

  22. Such rock is known as freestone; the term applies to any sandstone or limestone that cuts easily. Freestone predates both of the more specific geologic terms by several hundred years.

  23. Edmund M. Blunt, Blunt’s Stranger’s Guide to the City of New-York (New York: Edmund M. Blunt, 1817), 45.

  24. James Fenimore Cooper didn’t agree with the builders and thought the deep red brownstone was in “far better taste” than the marble front. “The moment the rear of the City Hall is seen, I was struck with an impression of the magnificent effect which might be produced by the use of its
material in Gothic architecture,” he wrote in letter VIII to Baron Von Kemperfelt in Notions of the Americans: Picked up a Traveling Bachelor (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Care, 1835).

  25. Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 28.

  26. Charles Lockwood, Bricks and Brownstone (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 104.

  27. A. J. Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses (New York: D. Appleton &Co., 1850), 198, 200.

  28. Bayne, Town of Portland, 520.

  29. All statistics from articles by Alison Guinness. The building now houses the exclusive Pacific Union Club, which acquired the structure in 1907 from Flood’s daughter. After the earthquake, the club gutted and rebuilt the house with stone from the Portland quarry.

  30. Lewis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865–1895 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932), 2–3.

  31. Mike Meehan, interview with author, Portland, Connecticut, October 25, 2006.

  2: THE GRANITE CITY

  1. William S. Pattee, A History of Old Braintree and Quincy (Quincy: Green &Prescott, 1878), 498.

  2. Shaw gave this speech on December 13, 1859, at the 473rd meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The speech was reprinted in volume 4 of the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 353–59.

  3. Shaw’s speech is the only known reference to Mr. Tarbox. He doesn’t appear in newspapers, death records, or any other official document from the period, at least none James and Mary Gage could find. They are coauthors of The Art of Splitting Stone: Early Rock Quarrying Methods in Pre-Industrial New England (Amesbury, MA: Powwow River Books, 2002). No one knows exactly what Tarbox said. I based my description of the Tarbox method on the Gages’ book, Shaw’s speech, and on an interview in Boston, Massachusetts, with James Gage in December 2003.

  4. Pattee, History of Old Braintree, 515.

  5. Bartram’s letter is quoted in the Art of Splitting Stone, p. 26.

  6. Information on the Finnish and Egyptian methods comes from George P. Merrill, Stones for Building and Decoration, 3rd ed. (New York: John Wiley &Sons, 1903), 393. Merrill’s is one of the best books detailing the stone industry.

  7. Smoky quartz can be turned clear again by heat. I have fond memories of fun times in college when we took a crystal of smoky quartz, placed it on a stove, cranked the burner up, and drove out the color. Those were the days!

  8. Arthur W. Brayley, History of the Granite Industry of New England (Boston: National Association of Granite Industries of the United States, 1913), 22–23.

  9. Willard left no record of his trek; the story comes from a single sentence written on a blank page in the notes of the Bunker Hill Building Committee in August 1849. The author was Amos Lawrence, a central player in the construction of the monument since the beginning. Willard’s journey is mentioned in William Wheildon’s Memoir of Solomon Willard (Boston: Bunker Hill Monument Association, 1865), 108.

  10. George Washington Warren, The History of Bunker Hill Monument Association During the First Century of the United States Of America (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1877), 202.

  11. Ibid., 47.

  12. Ibid., 157.

  13. Quoted in Sarah J. Purcell, “Commemoration, Public Art, and the Changing Meaning of the Bunker Hill Monument,” Public Historian 25, no. 2 (2003): 55–71.

  14. Wheildon, Memoir, 109.

  15. Warren, History, 140.

  16. Information and quotes from Bryant come from Charles B. Stuart, Lives and Works of Civil and Military Engineers of America (New York: D. Von Nostrand, 1871), 119–31.

  17. Information on Perkins’s contributions to the project comes from Carl Seaburg and Stanley Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston: Colonel T. H. Perkins, 1764–1854 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

  18. Ibid., 331, 333–34.

  19. Vic Campbell, interview with author, Quincy, Massachusetts, January 20, 2006.

  20. Fred Gamst, “The Context and Significance of America’s First Railroad, on Boston’s Beacon Hill,” Technology and Culture 33, no. 1 (1992): 66–100.

  21. Seaburg and Paterson, Merchant Prince, 337–38.

  22. Richard Bailey, interview with author, Boston, Massachusetts, January 19, 2006.

  23. Percy E. Raymond, “Notes on the Ontogeny of Paradoxides, with a description of a new species from Braintree, Mass,” Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology 58, no. 4 (1914): 225–47.

  24. W. O. Crosby and G. F. Loughlin, “A Descriptive Catalogue of the Building Stones of Boston and Vicinity,” Technology Quarterly 17 (1904): 165–85.

  25. The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1892), 19.

  26. Wheildon, Memoir, 142.

  27. Warren, History, 215.

  28. Ibid., 216.

  29. Ibid., 280–83.

  30. Ibid., 284, 298.

  31. S. Willard, Plans and Sections of the Obelisk on Bunker’s Hill (Boston: Chas. Cook’s Lith., 1843), 9.

  32. Jane Holtz Kay, Lost Boston (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 130.

  3: POETRY IN STONE

  1. “Winged Rock,” The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (New York: Random House, 1937), 361.

  2. The Selected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, 1897–1962, ed. Ann N. Ridgeway (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 213.

  3. Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (New York: Viking, 1994), 49.

  4. “Tor House,” Selected Poetry, 197.

  5. Aaron Yoshinobu, interview with author, Carmel, California, April 28, 2006.

  6. “To the House,” Selected Poetry, 82.

  7. “Tamar,” Ibid., 49.

  8. “The Old Stonemason,” Robinson Jeffers Selected Poems, the centenary edition, ed. Colin Falck (Manchester, England: Carcanet, 1987), 81.

  9. Ibid.

  10. “Gray Weather,” Selected Poetry, 572.

  11. “The Inhumanist,” Robinson Jeffers, The Double Axe and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1948), 54.

  12. “Woman at Point Sur,” The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, vol. 1, ed. Tim Hunt (Palo Alto,CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 309.

  13. “The Inhumanist,” Double Axe, 57.

  14. Melba Berry Bennett, The Stone Mason of Tor House (Los Angeles: Ritchie, 1966), 4.

  15. Selected Letters, 353.

  16. Bennett, Stone Mason, 24.

  17. Sidney S. Albert, A Bibliography of the Works of Robinson Jeffers (New York: Bert Franklin, 1968), XVI.

  18. Bennett, Stone Mason, 31.

  19. Ibid., 47.

  20. Selected Letters, 353.

  21. Los Angeles Times review, December 8, 1912, written under the name Willard Huntington Wright but generally attributed to Jeffers according to Alex Vardamis, The Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers;A Biographical Study (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972), 35.

  22. Lawrence Clark Powell, An Introduction to Robinson Jeffers (Ph.D. diss., University of Dijon, 1932), 9.

  23. Bennett, Stone Mason, 71.

  24. Ibid., 70.

  25. Robert Brophy, “M. J. Murphy Masterbuilder and Tor House,” Robinson Jeffers Newsletter 78 (1990): 24–27.

  26. “The Bed by the Window,” Selected Poetry, 362.

  27. “The Last Conservative,” The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, vol. 3, ed. Tim Hunt (Palo Alto,CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 18.

  28. Dennis Copeland, archivist with the Monterey Public Library, wrote in an e-mail in April 2006 that the salvaged porthole most likely came from the brig Natalia, which had sunk near Monterey on December 21, 1834, and not from Napoleon’s ship the Inconstant, as reported by Donnan Jeffers in The Stone of Tor House.

  29. Dave Barbeau, phone interview with author, April 2006.

  30. About 27 million years ago the subducting Farallon Plate disappeared completely under North America. The Pacific Plate, which was moving north
west, became dominant and began to carry material up the California coast, and the San Andreas Fault was born.

  31. James M. Mattinson and Eric W. James, “Salinian Block U/Pb Age and Isotopic Variations: Implications for Origin and Emplacement of the Salinian Terrane,” Tectonostratigraphic Terranes of the Circum-Pacific Region: Circum-Pacific Council Energy Mineral Resources, ed. D. G. Howell, Earth Science, series 1 (1985): 215–26.

  32. Dana Gioia, review of Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers, ed. Robert Hass, Nation 246, no. 2 ( January 16, 1988): 56–64.

  33. “Old age hath clawed me,” The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, vol. 4, ed. Tim Hunt (Palo Alto,CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 484.

  34. “Flight of Swans,” Selected Poetry, 577.

  35. “Pelicans,” Collected Poetry, v. 1, 207.

  36. Ibid., 207.

  37. “Birds and Fishes,” Collected Poetry, v. 3, 426.

  38. “The Loving Shepherdess,” Selected Poetry, 357.

  39. “The Women at Point Sur,” Selected Poetry, 154.

  40. “All night long,” Collected Poetry, v. 3, 481.

  41. “Pelicans,” Collected Poetry, v. 1, 207.

  42. “Night Without Sleep,” Selected Poetry, 609.

  43. “Rock and Hawk,” Selected Poetry, 563.

  44. “The Last Conservative,” Collected Poetry, v. 3, 418.

  45. “Tor House,” Selected Poetry, 197.

  4: DEEP TIME IN MINNESOTA

  1. Siccar appears to derive from scaur, a rock or precipice.

  2. Basil Tikoff, phone interview with author, November 2005. Tikoff is also the “one geologist” quoted at the end of the chapter.

  3. J. C. Beltrami, Pilgrimage in Europe and America, leading to the discovery of the sources of the Mississippi and Bloody river; with a description of the whole course of the former and of the Ohio (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1828), 318.

  4. Ibid., 319.

  5. George Thiel and Carl Dutton, “Architectural, Structural, and Monumental Stones of Minnesota,” Minnesota Geological Survey Bulletin 25 (1935): 92.

  6. William Keating, Narrative of an Expedition to the Source of St. Peter’s River, Lake Winnepeek, Lake of the Woods, &c. performed in the Year 1823 (Philadelphia: George B. Whittaker, 1824), 350.