Stories in Stone

by David B. Williams

  7. Ussher (1581–1656) was not alone in generating dates. In 1809 Irish professor William Hales listed 156 proposed Creation dates ranging from sixty-five hundred to thirty-six hundred years before Christ’s birth.

  8. John Playfair, “Biographical Account of the Late Dr. James Hutton,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 5 (1805).

  9. Most information on age-of-Earth dates comes from The Age of the Earth: from 4004 bc to ad 2002, ed. C. L. E. Lewis and S. J. Knell, Geological Society Special Publication 190 (2001).

  10. S. S. Goldich,A. O. C. Nier, H. Baadsgaard, and J. H. Hoffman,“K40/A40 dating of Precambrian rocks of Minnesota (abs),” Geological Society of America Bulletin 67 (1956): 1698–99.

  11. Pb is the chemical symbol for lead because its Latin name was plumbum nigrum, black lead, which also gave us the word plumbing. Uranium received its name from its discoverer, Martin Klaproth, who named the new element in 1789 for the then most recently discovered planet, Uranus, which referred to Urania, the muse of astronomy and geometry. Coincidentally, Klaproth also discovered zirconium.

  12. Zircon derives from the Persian words zar, or gold, and gun, or color, in reference to the mineral’s color.

  13. Typical magmas are rich in a stew of various elements, most of which occur in miniscule amounts. When minerals crystallize they can incorporate these trace elements, although the elements don’t show up in the mineral’s chemical formula. For example, zircon’s formula is ZrSiO4 but it can also include promethium, hafnium, yttrium, and samarium, as well as uranium.

  14. Pat Bickford, phone interviews with author, June 2007.

  15. E. J. Catanzaro, “Zircon ages in southwestern Minnesota,” Journal of Geophysical Research 68 (1963): 2045–48.

  16. S. S. Goldich and C. E. Hedge, “3,800-Myr granitic gneisses in south-western Minnesota,” Nature 252 (December 6, 1974): 467–68.

  17. M. E. Bickford, J. L. Wooden, and R. L. Bauer, “SHRIMP study of zircons from Early Archean Rocks in the Minnesota River Valley: Implications for the tectonic history of the Superior Province,” Geological Society of America Bulletin 118 (2006), 94–108.

  18. Robert Stern, phone interview with author, May 2007.

  19. Kent Condie, phone interview with author, June 2007.

  20. Mark Gross, interview with author,Morton, Minnesota, May 21, 2007.

  21. D. L. Southwick and V. W. Chandler, “Block and shear-zone architecture of the Minnesota River Valley subprovince: implications for late Archean accretionary tectonics,” Canadian Journal of Earth Science 33 (1996): 831–47.

  22. You also may see the term migmatite, a word used by geologists to describe well-mixed rocks such as the Morton. Not all gneisses are migmatic but all migmatites are gneiss.

  23. Dan Rea, interview with author, Cold Spring, Minnesota, May 21, 2007.

  24. G.W. Featherstonhaugh, A Canoe Voyage up the Minnay Sotor (London: Richard Bentley, 1847), 326.

  25. Named for Civil War veteran General Gouverneur Kemble Warren, who hypothesized such a river during a survey in 1868.

  26. This is the total area ever covered by the lake. Its maximum size at one time was 324,000 square miles, about the combined size of Texas and Oklahoma. Data comes from two papers. David Leverington, Jason Mann, and James Teller, “Changes in the Bathymetry and Volume of Glacial Lake Agassiz between 9200 and 7700 14C yr B.P.,” Quaternary Research 57 (2002):244–52, and James Teller and David Leverington, “Glacial Lake Agassiz: A 5000 yr history of change and its relationship to the 18O record of Greenland,” GSA Bulletin 116 (2004): 729–42.

  5: THE CLAM THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

  1. Robert M. Weir, “Charles Town Circa 1702: On the Cusp,” El Escribano 39 (2002): 64–79.

  2. Verner Winslow Crane, The Southern Frontier (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 75.

  3. Details from the attack come from Charles W. Arnande,“The Siege of St. Augustine in 1702,” University of Florida Monographs, Social Sciences, no. 3, Summer 1959.

  4. Joe Brehm, interview with author, St. Augustine, Florida, January 5, 2007.

  5. The peaceful transfer was part of the Adams-Onis Treaty, which settled territorial boundaries between Spain and the United States in Florida, Texas, and the Rocky Mountains.

  6. Joe Brehm told me that in 1935, after Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland starred in the movie Captain Blood, which featured a fortress with a moat, the National Park Service received hundreds of pounds of mail requesting that the fort fill its moat.

  7. Gastroliths are rocks swallowed by birds that aid in digestion. Dinosaurs also swallowed gastroliths.

  8. Wendy B. Zomlefer and David E. Giannasi, “Floristic Survey of Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, St. Augustine, Florida,” Castanea 70 (2005):222–36.

  9. Michael Gannon, The New History of Florida (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 30.

  10. The best information on forts and life in St. Augustine comes from Verne E. Chatelain, “The Defenses of Spanish Florida 1565–1763,” Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 511 (1941). Other good information comes from Jeannette Connor, “The Nine Old Wooden Forts of St. Augustine,” parts 1–2, Florida Historical Society Quarterly IV (1967): 103–11, 171–80; Eugene Lyon, “The First Three Wooden Forts of Spanish St. Augustine,” El Escribano 34 (1997): 140–57; Albert Manucy, “Building Materials in 16th-Century St. Augustine,” El Escrib-ano 20 (1984): 51–71.

  11. Connor, “Nine Old Wooden Forts,” 110.

  12. Michael Gannon first coined this concept in his Florida, A Short History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), when he wrote that “by the time the Pilgrims came ashore at Plymouth, St. Augustine was up for urban renewal.” Elsbeth Gordon added to Gannon’s phrase in her fascinating Florida’s Colonial Architectural Heritage (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). Floridians take deep umbrage at the prevailing idea that America’s colonial story begins in Virginia and Massachusetts and not in Florida.

  13. Connor, “Nine Old Wooden Forts,” 172.

  14. Ibid., 172.

  15. The best description of Searles’s attack occurs in Luis Rafael Arana, “The Basis of a Permanent Fortification,” in El Escribano 36 (1999), 3–11.

  16. Arana describes this maneuvering in detail, from El Escribano 36.

  17. The History of Castillo de San Marcos (St. Augustine: Historic Print & Map Co., 2005).

  18. An article in the 1950s described thousands of goldfish swimming in abandoned coquina quarries. People would travel to the island to “pan gold.”

  19. Olaf Ellers, phone interview with author, December 2006.

  20. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek Cookery (New York: Fireside, 1996), 16–17.

  21. Donald F. McNeill, “Petrologic Characteristics of the Pleistocene Anastasia Formation, Florida East Coast” (master’s thesis, University of Florida, 1983).

  22. Description of calcite, aragonite, formation, and seasoning based on author’s phone conversation with Donald McNeill, January 2007.

  23. Based on author’s conversation with Roger Portell, Division of Paleontology, Florida Museum of Natural History, who kindly showed me the ghost crabs and talked in depth about the deposition of the Anastasia Formation, Gainesville, Florida, January 2007.

  24. Description of life of Donax based on phone conversation with Olaf Ellers. For more information consult his papers: “Biological Control of Swash-Riding, in the Clam Donax variabilis,” Biological Bulletin 189 (1995): 120–27, and “Discrimination Among Wave-Generated Sounds by a Swash-riding Clam,” Biological Bulletin 189 (1995): 128–37.

  25. Albert Manucy, The Houses of St. Augustine (St. Augustine: St. Augustine Historical Society, 1962).

  26. The following section on the construction of the castillo was pieced together from The History of Castillo de San Marcos and “The Defenses of Spanish Florida 1565–1763.”

  27. History of Castillo, 28.

  28. Tabby, also called piedra de ostion (oyster stone), was
made by mixing water and sand with lime and oyster shells. The shells came from ancient Native American middens. Tabby was used primarily in the 1700s in buildings as far north as Charleston, South Carolina.

  29. George Fairbanks,The Spaniards in Florida: Comprising the Notable Settlement of the Huguenots in 1564 and the History and Antiquities of St. Augustine ( Jacksonville, FL: Columbus Drew, 1868), 103.

  30. Kathyrn Hall Proby, Audubon in Florida, with Selections from the Writings of John James Audubon (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1974), 15.

  31. History of Castillo, 43.

  32. British rule provides the framework for one of the few novels set in St. Augustine. Eugenia Price’s Maria is a fictionalized account of Mary Evans, who arrived in 1763 and became quite wealthy before losing her money in a May-December marriage. She died in 1792. Neither particularly good nor bad, it does not, however, mention coquina. St. Augustine was also the setting for one movie, an absolutely horrible attempt at comedy called Illegally Yours. It does show the castillo, which has become the mansion of a rich oddball, who has decorated it with Greek statues and a Chinese pagoda. Gary Cooper also starred as a rebel soldier in a movie that shows the castillo, this time named Fort Infanta. Distant Drums focuses on the Seminole wars and features Cooper and a handful of men taking the fort. Again no one notes the coquina but one of Cooper’s men does note that the fort was designed by Enrico Garcia, one of Spain’s greatest military architects, and that it is impossible to take with less than a brigade.

  33. Kathleen Deagan, “A New Florida & A New Century: The Impact of the English Invasion on Daily Life in St. Augustine,” El Esribano 39 (2002): 102–12.

  34. Alfred J. Morrison, ed.,Travels in the Confederation, 1783–1784. From the German of Johann David Schoepf (New York: Bergman, 1968), 250.

  35. Proby, Audubon in Florida, 17.

  36. Oddly, Audubon didn’t paint the fort. George Lehman, a Swiss artist, who accompanied Audubon on his 1831–1832 trip down the east coast of Florida, painted the castillo while they stayed in St. Augustine ( January 1831). This was not unusual. Audubon often hired another artist to accompany him on his journeys, to paint plants and landscapes for use as backgrounds in his prints, which allowed Audubon to concentrate on his birds.

  37. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Palmetto-Leaves (Boston: James Osgood and Co., 1873), 206.

  38. Gary Wilson, Lakeview Dirt Co., Inc., phone interview with author, February 2007.

  6: AMERICA’S BUILDING STONE

  1. Keith said that his analogy was to the holy trinity of Cajun cooking—onions, green pepper, and celery—and not to the better-known holy trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Interview with author, Bloomington, Indiana, September 10, 2007.

  2. If you look at the back of a one-dollar bill, you will also see limestone. The pyramids of Egypt are made of a fossil-rich limestone.

  3. Amy Brier, interview with author, Bloomington, Indiana, September 12, 2007.

  4. Specifically the species is Globoendothyra baileyi.

  5. Todd Thompson, interview with author, Bloomington, Indiana, September 10, 2007.

  6. Until the late 1980s, scientists thought that stalked crinoids could not move, and until 2005 they had never photographed one moving. That year researchers in the Bahamas videotaped one crawling across the sandy bottom. The animal had broken off its holdfast and pulled itself along by its flexible arms. It moved one to two inches per second and was last seen speeding away from a determined and hungry sea urchin.

  7. Merrill, Stones for Building, 405.

  8. Ibid., 405.

  9. Joseph Batchelor, “An Economic History of the Indiana Oolitic Limestone Industry,” Indiana Business Studies Study 27 (1944): 40.

  10. Ibid., 40.

  11. George Jones, interview with author, Bedford, Indiana, September 13, 2007. I could not have seen all of the quarries and mills and met their owners without the generous help of Jim Owens, executive director of the Indiana Limestone Institute, the industry’s trade association.

  12. In past times the colors used to be buff and blue. Originally buyers preferred blue over buff. Blue or gray is the natural color, with water oxidizing the stone to buff.

  13. Only one Indiana mill uses the giant bread-slicer-like gang saws described in chapter 4. Bybee Stone has stuck with a few gang saws because they give the stone a rougher, more rustic finish. Their decision paid off in 2001, when they won the contract to repair the Salem Limestone walls damaged by the September 11 bombing of the Pentagon. By June 2002, Bybee had sent 2.1 million pounds of cut limestone to Washington,D.C.

  14. Bob Thrasher, interview with author, Bloomington, Indiana, September 11, 2007.

  15. Will Bybee, interview with author, Ellettsville, Indiana, September 10, 2007.

  16. “The Great Rebuilding,” Chicago Tribune, October 9, 1872: 8.

  17. Ibid.

  18. The Chicago Tribune (August 20, 1876) called the bidding process “utter absurdity.” The board’s initial choice of contractor put in a bid of $895,000. When that bid failed, the board, or “the Ring,” hoped to make their money by finding an architect who would help plunder the system.

  19. Both quotes come from: Twenty First Annual Report, Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Indianapolis (1896): 323.

  20. Jim O’Connor, “Building Stones of Our Nation’s Capital,” unpublished manuscript, unknown date, 46.

  21. If you want to get a feel for the Indiana stone industry, I recommend the movie Breaking Away. It takes place in Bloomington in the late 1970s and centers on four recent high school graduates, Dave,Moocher, Cyril, and Mike. Ostensibly about the relationship between mill workers, or Cutters, and college kids, Breaking Away is filled with the angst and self-doubt of young men who cannot follow their father’s footsteps. “They’re gonna keep calling us ‘Cutters.’ To them it’s just a dirty word. To me it’s just something else I never got a chance to be,” says Mike. Breaking Away has some fine scenes of mills, abandoned quarries, and biking.

  22. Dale Enochs, interview with author, Bloomington, Indiana, September 11, 2007.

  7: POP ROCKS, PILFERED FOSSILS, AND PHILLIPS PETROLEUM

  1. Dorothy Smith, interview with author, Lamar, Colorado, July 10, 2007.

  2. Kirk Johnson, phone interview with author, July 2007.

  3. In one case, a well-known cartoonist was on vacation near what would become Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, in Colorado, and saw a piece of petrified wood that he wanted for his home garden. Since the wood was on private land, he was able to buy it. His wife, however, didn’t want the fossil at home so it ended up in the cartoonist’s amusement park, Disneyland.

  4. Lester Ward, “Sketch of Paleobotany,” Fifth Annual Report United States Geological Survey (1885): 385.

  5. From a letter to John Ray, quoted in Three Physico-Theological Discourses (New York: Arno Press, 1978), 190.

  6. J. B. Delair and W. A. S. Sarjeant, “The Earliest Discoveries of Dinosaurs: The Records Reexamined,” Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association 113 (2002): 185–97.

  7. Commentary on Chapter 2, Verse 12 of Genesis, from Luther’s Works, Volume 1 (Lectures on Genesis Chapters 1–5) (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955), 98.

  8. Ward, “Sketch,” 390–91.

  9. When I lived in Moab, Utah, I heard of one of the rarer petrifying agents, uranium. A friend told me of fossilized wood where uranium ore had replaced entire trees, which had been mined limb by limb.

  10. Description of formation of petrified wood based on phone interview with George Mustoe, geologist at Western Washington University, August 8, 2007.

  11. Granger was not the first to find this cabin. William Reed and Frank Willis-ton had also seen it in the 1870s but they concluded that the bones, which a fellow paleontologist referred to as “head cheese,” were too deteriorated for further exploration. The best information on these discoveries comes from two papers: John McIntosh, “The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush,” Earth Sciences Mo
nthly 9, no.1 (1990): 22–27, and Vincent Morgan and Spencer G. Lucas, “Walter Granger, 1872–1941, Paleontologist,” New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Sciences 19, (2002).

  12. The Texas Tourist Camp in Decatur, Texas, and the Petrified Wood Park in Lemmon, South Dakota, also feature petrified wood structures. Both were built in the 1930s and both are on the National Register of Historic Places.

  13. James Agee, “The Great American Roadside,” Fortune (September 1934): 53–63, 172, 176–77.

  14. William Kaszynski, The American Highway: The History and Culture of Roads in the United States ( Jefferson, NC : McFarland & Company, Inc., 2000), 40–42.

  15. John Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, The Gas Station in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 51.

  16. Ibid., 52.

  17. Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979), 35.

  18. Michael Karl Witzel, The American Gas Station (Osceola,WI: Motorbooks International, 1992), 34.

  19. Jakle and Sculle, Gas Station, 58.

  20. Witzel, American Gas, 60.

  21. Carolyn Peyton, interview with author, Lamar, Colorado, July 10, 2007.

  22. Greg Emick, interview with author, Lamar, Colorado, July 10, 2007.

  23. Quoted in Lamar Daily News, November 17, 1978.

  8: THE TROUBLE WITH MICHELANGELO’S FAVORITE STONE

  1. All quoted phrases come from Edward Durell Stone, Evolution of an Architect (New York: Horizon Press, 1962). They are found on pages 149, 143, 143, and 151, respectively.

  2. Ms. Swearingen’s quote from 1970 is referred to in an article in the Chicago Sun-Times, March 7, 1989.

  3. All information on building, examination, and cladding of the Amoco Building is from Ian R. Chin, Proceedings of the Seminar on the Recladding of the Amoco Building in Chicago, IL Held on November 11, 1993 (Chicago: The Chicago Committee on High Rise Buildings, 1994).

  4. John Logan, phone interview with author, November 2007.

  5. Chin, Proceedings, 4–1.