Stories in Stone

by David B. Williams

  One of my most pleasant discoveries when Marjorie and I moved to Boston in 1996 was the prevalence of granite as a building stone. I had come east expecting the worst. I was leaving twelve-thousand-foot-high mountain ranges and towering cliffs of sandstone for a landscape whose only geologic feature that I knew of was a boulder that a boatload of religious renegades supposedly stepped onto in 1620. When we got here, though, I found granite curbs, benches, and bridges, as well as a beautiful pink granite library and gray granite post office and museum.

  Granite also crept up in friends’ houses. Granite countertops have become one of the hottest features in real estate. If you look at ads for any condo or town house or new subdivision, most listings trumpet the stone. The popularity of these must-have kitchen accoutrements has helped make granite perhaps the best-known type of stone to nongeologists. (Not forgetting, of course, how every four years granite bursts on the scene in the form of Olympic curling stones.)

  Throughout the country, granite is widespread and common. It tops the lower forty-eight’s highest spot, Mt. Whitney, and floors the deepest gorge, Hells Canyon on the Snake River. Granite is a type of igneous rock that began as a liquid, or magma, and solidified within the planet. Granites appeared at the surface only when tectonic forces shoved them up or erosion stripped away the overlying rocks. The word “granite,” comes from the Italian granito, or grained, in reference to the interlocked grains of minerals that make up the stone.

  In a hand specimen and particularly in the wall of a building where they have been polished, granites resemble no other building stone. Minerals range in size from a peppercorn to a plum. Some minerals have a glassy appearance. Others twinkle. Most are dull. Granite can be pink or red, infrequently green to black, and commonly white to gray. Rarely will you find any layering, consistent orientation of the grains, or swirls. You will never find fossils.

  The Quincy Granite fits this general description, albeit with idiosyncrasies. Most granites contain two types of the mineral feldspar, broadly called plagioclase feldspar and alkali feldspar. In contrast, Quincy contains only alkali feldspar, a result of solidifying at a high temperature. Alkali feldspar gives the rock its characteristic green-tinted, dusky gray color. (One Quincy quarry owner called himself the “Extra Dark Man” because of the particularly dark stone excavated from his property.) Further darkening results from Quincy’s nearly black quartz, as opposed to the more common clear or white varieties.7 High temperature also sapped the Quincy Granite’s magma of another typical granite mineral, mica, and led to the formation of an unusual mineral known as riebeckite. Because riebeckite is harder than mica, it allows the Quincy Granite to take a high polish. Riebeckite also contains a very stable form of iron, which means that Quincy Granite doesn’t rust and stain when it weathers.

  Dark and hard, polishable, and weather-resistant, and with Tarbox’s plug and feather cutting technology in place, the Quincy Granite was an ideal stone for the incipient building trade. All it needed was a signature building.

  Little was done with granite for the twenty years after Tarbox ventured south to Quincy. Workers completed Bulfinch’s State Prison in 1805, although not with Quincy Granite. Instead, Bulfinch used Chelmsford granite, which could be floated twenty-six miles down the recently completed Middlesex Canal. Granite also went into the Boston courthouse, University Hall at Harvard, several Boston churches, and Massachusetts General Hospital, but these, and a few others, were the only notable granite buildings to appear by 1825.8 Although made from granite, all were built in a traditional style using conventionally sized blocks.

  This interlude between 1803 and 1825 was granite’s incubation period. Architects were experimenting with how to design with granite, and transportation was a problem. In Quincy, stonemasons were learning better how to take advantage of the plug and feather technique and still primarily working with rocks they found on the ground. What would become the Granite Railway Quarry was still a forested knob known as Pine Hill when incubation ended.

  In 1825 an architect-engineer named Solomon Willard arrived in Quincy. Legend has it that he had walked three hundred miles across New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts in search of the perfect granite for what would become his most famous building, the Bunker Hill Monument. Willard found that granite at a ledge in a wooded area about a mile from the King’s Chapel “quarry” site.9

  Born June 2, 1783, in Petersham, Massachusetts, Willard spent his youth on the family farm and in his father’s carpentry shop. He moved to Boston when he turned twenty-one “to seek, not his fortune (as is the object of so many), but his own intellectual improvement, and the means and opportunity of doing greater good,” according to the official history of the Bunker Hill Monument.10

  When not helping his fellow man, Willard studied architecture and drawing. He relied on carpentry to make a living. Willard carved columns for the steeple at Park Street Church, an eagle for the pediment at the old Custom House, and a model of the U.S. Capitol for Charles Bulfinch. He began carving stone and in 1819 cut the Ionic columns for St. Paul’s Church, which launched the fad for Greek Revival structures in Boston. These columns were made from Aquia Creek sandstone, a notoriously crumbly rock quarried in Virginia and used in the U.S. Capitol and the White House. Willard also began to design buildings and to teach drawing and architecture. By the early 1820s, he was well known and well regarded in Boston.

  His involvement with Bunker Hill began in August 1824, when directors of the Bunker Hill Monument Association (BHMA) asked Willard to submit a plan for a monumental column. Boston Brahmins, such as Daniel Webster and Thomas Handasyd Perkins, had formed the association in 1823 to build “a simple, majestic, lofty, and permanent monument, which shall carry down to remote ages a testimony . . . to the heroic virtue and courage of those men who began and achieved the independence of their country.”11

  By 1825 the BHMA had raised money and decided what type of monument would best honor one of the most important battles of the Revolution, which the American forces lost and that didn’t occur on Bunker Hill. They also purchased property—eventually totaling fifteen acres—on Breed’s Hill, where the battle did take place. Apparently not pleased with Willard’s potential design, the directors also published a notice in Boston papers and around the country announcing a design competition, with the winner receiving a hundred dollars. In response, Willard told Boston’s best and brightest he “had no wish to enter into any contest about the designs.”12 (I suspect that in private his words were a bit saltier.)

  Fifty designs were submitted, including an obelisk from Robert Mills, who designed the Washington Monument in 1836. A former student of Willard’s, Horatio Greenough, won the competition in April with his own obelisk. In his memoir Greenough wrote,“The obelisk . . . says but one word, but it speaks loud. If I understand its voice, it says, Here! It says no more.”13

  Despite Greenough’s plan, the directors dithered on whether an obelisk or a column was more appropriate for the monument. Part of the problem was style and part was cost, so the BHMA appealed to Willard to make a cost estimate for an obelisk and for a column. After learning that a column would cost $75,000 and an obelisk $60,000, the directors finally reduced their decision to one all could agree upon and chose the obelisk. Keeping to their rapid-fire decision-making, they appointed a committee of five to prepare a design.

  It was most likely during his cost preparation work that Willard found his ledge in Quincy. Two days after the directors’ meeting, a young engineer and friend of Willard's, Gridley Bryant, who had helped Willard on the cost estimates, bought the four-acre property in Quincy for $250.14

  Ten days after approving the obelisk, and for no apparent reason not willing to use Greenough’s plan, association directors laid a cornerstone commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Thousands watched on June 17, 1825, as the great French general the Marquis de Lafayette led the ceremonies. Workers buried a box within the cornerstone that contained official accou
nts of the battle, coins and medals, and a piece of Plymouth Rock, a 620-million-year-old granite from Dedham.15

  The design committee presented their plan on July 5. Taller and simpler than Greenough’s obelisk, the new proposal included details on the foundation, the interior lighting and steps, size of stones, obelisk dimension, and cost. Construction and design now totaled $100,000. The committee also recommended hiring an architect and superintendent.

  Continuing to move at their normal speedy pace, the directors named Solomon Willard as architect and superintendent on October 31,1825. He offered to do the job for free but ultimately accepted the $500 per year the committee insisted he be paid. He also gave $1,000 to the BHMA. His first proposal as superintendent was to purchase the ledge of granite from Gridley Bryant, which the association did for $325, a nice profit for Bryant. During the winter Willard finalized the drawings for the obelisk, increasing the size of the building blocks from eighteen inches to thirty-two inches tall.

  Transportation presented the central snag for Willard. How would he move blocks that weighed up to six tons across the twelve miles of swamp, forest, and farms that separated Quincy from Charlestown? Willard favored either a completely overland route or moving the stone in winter, when sledges could carry the blocks to the Neponset River, four miles north. A barge would transport the stone through Boston Harbor to Charlestown, which formed a peninsula on the north side of the Charles River, due north of downtown Boston. Gridley Bryant had another idea. Six years younger than Willard, Bryant was born in Scituate, Massachusetts. In recalling his childhood, Bryant wrote that he had a “mechanical and inventive turn of mind . . . I was generally at the head of the young urchins of our neighborhood, and when there was a fort to be constructed . . . I was always appointed the chief engineer.” Despite his friends’ high regard, his mother pushed him out of the house at fifteen to apprentice with a leading Boston builder. Six years later he headed out on his own and by the early 1820s, Bryant was one of the foremost masons in Boston, including a stint working for Willard.16

  In late 1825 Bryant suggested a railway as the best means to transport granite from the quarry to the Neponset River. He came up with the idea after hearing about English railroads transporting stone from quarries. The BHMA rejected his plan as too ambitious. Not to be thwarted, Bryant presented his idea to several businessmen, including Thomas Handasyd Perkins, who although a member of the association, was open to Bryant’s proposition.17

  Perkins, a Boston merchant and philanthropist who had made a fortune in the China trade, not the least of which was from opium, endorsed the project. He knew about railroads from trips to England and recognized their moneymaking potential. With Perkins’s prompting, a group made a petition to the state legislature on January 5, 1826, to establish a railroad. The bill passed on March 4 chartering the Granite Railway Company with Perkins as president. (In a letter, Perkins wrote “I think I may safely call it my road, not only because I set it agoing, but because I own 3/5ths of it.”)18 The Perkins group hired Bryant as superintendent and designer. On April 1, 1826, he broke ground on what was called, and is often still called, the first railroad in the United States.

  “If you use enough adjectives, you can get it right,” said Vic Campbell, who has spent the past forty years researching the history of the Granite Railway, locating its route, and telling people about it.19 “The Granite Railway was the first chartered, commercial railway in the United States.” He noted that Fred Gamst, a former anthropology professor at the University of Massachusetts, determined that the Granite Railway was actually the twelfth American railway. The first was in Boston, ran about one-quarter mile, and carried dirt off Beacon Hill to fill the Back Bay. Built in 1805, the Beacon Hill Railroad would have been running when a displaced Scituate teenager arrived in town. Gamst speculated that such an unusual operation would have attracted the attention of a young Gridley Bryant despite his later claim that “all the cars, trucks, and machinery are my original invention.”20

  Campbell stood just below the site of Willard’s ledge, or what was left of it, since any rock that enticed Willard is now twelve miles away in the monument. A ledgy granite hill covered, probably as it was in 1825, by pine trees and boulders, rose above the mostly flat and bare ground. As Campbell walked among piles of cut and uncut granite, he pointed out where the masons squared and numbered stones, the blacksmith’s shop, and the superintendent’s building.

  He stopped near several large rectangular stones partially buried in the soil. “This is mile zero of the Granite Railway,” said Campbell. About 125 feet of moss-covered path ran along the ground. Every eight feet a ten-inch-square, seven-foot-long granite block, known as a sleeper, lay perpendicular to the path. This is the only relatively intact section left of the Granite Railway, although no rails remain.

  The sleepers rest on several feet of crushed rock, which Bryant used to protect the tracks from frost-induced buckling. He then placed pine rails, six inches wide by twelve inches high, on top of the sleepers. The tracks were five feet apart and held in place by iron pins, several of which still stick out of the granite. On top of the pine ran four-by-four-inch oak timbers supporting a quarter-inch-thick iron strip, called a strap rail, where the flanged wheels rested. When the wood wore out, Bryant replaced it with granite. As we reached the end of the path, which extended into a shrub-filled swamp between rock walls, Campbell’s enthusiastic gestures nearly propelled him off the raised railroad, but I grabbed him before he tumbled off the six-foot-high wall.

  Bryant’s most innovative design was his rail car, fourteen feet long, eleven feet tall, and supported by six-and-one-half-foot-high wheels. The empty car would back up to where the cut blocks were. Workers would turn gears on the car, which would lower a pallet supported by six chains. They would unhook the pallet, move the car forward, load a block or blocks, and back the car up again. “One man could raise a six-ton block, which could be up to three feet wide and thirty-two inches high,” said Campbell.

  After crossing on trestles over the swamp, the railroad curved around Pine Hill and by Willard’s house, before heading straight northwest to the Neponset River. Along the way it dropped eighty-five feet. Two pullouts allowed cars going in opposite directions to pass. Not that traffic was much of a problem but the route did cross several streets, where chains prevented slow speed collisions. The railroad ended at a twelve-hundred-foot-long wharf, which took six months to build and cost two-thirds of the total fifty-thousand-dollar price of the railroad.

  Barges and sloops carried the blocks down the Neponset, across Boston Harbor to Charlestown. They landed at Deven’s Wharf, coincidentally near where Paul Revere began the most famous horse ride in American history. Subsequent filling in of the harbor has obliterated the wharf, which was adjacent to the Charles River Bridge. Ox-drawn carts carried the blocks the final few hundred yards up to the building site.

  Bryant made the first test run of the railroad on October 7, 1826. Workers loaded three cars with sixteen tons of rock and a single horse pulled the entire load. The horse arrived at the Neponset wharf in less than an hour. The railroad men celebrated, drinking from brown glass bottles imprinted with “Success to the Railroad.”21 The next load would not arrive at the river until the following spring.

  “Willard was never a big supporter of the railroad. He wanted the work done faster,” said Campbell. Willard also worried about stone breakage on the railroad and paid for a survey of the twelve-mile overland route. “He started work on quarrying in March 1826, built up a huge collection of blocks, and had to wait until March 1827 before the railroad carried any stone. He stormed off the job several times in the first few years because of his concerns,” said Campbell.

  “The Quincy Granite is its own special case,” said Dick Bailey, a geologist at Northeastern University.22 He has spent more than three decades studying New England geology, focusing primarily on the Avalon terrane, a suite of rocks central to understanding the oddball history of the Quincy Granite
.

  A terrane is a fault-bounded body of rock, with limited extent, characterized by a geologic history different from the history of nearby rocks. Current thinking holds that the Avalon terrane began life as part of South America. The central line of evidence comes from chemical analysis of minute minerals, called zircons, found in both northwest South America and in rocks around Boston. Bailey rejects this model. He favors an African origin.

  His main evidence is a truly astounding creature, a trilobite fossil discovered in 1834 at a slate quarry three miles east of the Granite Railway Quarry. The most charismatic crustacean of the Cambrian Period, trilobites foraged on ocean bottoms for 300 million years. Most species were a couple of inches long, or shorter, and resembled a pill bug, or rolypoly. The one from Quincy, Paradoxides harlani, was twelve inches long, which led Percy Raymond, a curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, to write in 1914 that Paradoxides is “such an oasis in the sterility of Massachusetts paleontology” that it borders on the “domain of romance.”23

  Raymond didn’t know the most exotic part of the story, that the 510-million-year-old Paradoxides was not a North American trilobite. Its closest relatives, including a sixteen-inch-long Moroccan giant, lived in north Africa. Along with several other much smaller trilobites from the same quarry, the Quincy fossils provided the first clue that Avalon was an exotic landmass. “I am a paleontologist, which is why I haven’t given up on the northwest Africa position. There’s something a lot more compelling to the trilobites than to isotope analyses,” said Bailey.