Stories in Stone

by David B. Williams

  Avalon’s plate tectonics history can best be described in accordionlike terms with continents opening, oceans closing, oceans opening, and finally landmasses colliding. The terrane’s story began between 700 and 800 million years ago on the edge of a supercontinent known as Rodinia (Russian for motherland). Consisting of parts of Gondwana and Laurentia (North America and Greenland) that had glommed together 300 million years earlier, Rodinia was beginning to rip itself apart. A massive rift valley formed and filled with nearly pure quartz sands carried by rivers. Known as the Westboro Formation, the sands later lithified into what is New England’s oldest sedimentary rock.

  The next oldest rocks formed 620 million years ago when a closing ocean basin slammed a narrow belt of islands into the continent. This collision produced a pink granite that resembles Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream. Known as the Dedham Granite, it is geologically the oldest Boston-based rock used as building stone. Dedham Granite is also what the Pilgrims first stepped onto when they landed in 1620.

  As another rift opened, sediments began to flow into a marine basin. This collection of rocks has been designated by geologists as the Boston Bay Group. Bailey’s work has helped show that more than seventeen thousand feet of mudstones, sandstones, and conglomerates accumulated in the sea that dominated the area between 605 and 543 million years ago.

  The Boston Bay Group includes two other important local building stones. The first is Cambridge slate, one of the earlier stones in the building trade. The second building stone is a purple-hued stew of boulders, cobbles, and pebbles suspended in a fine-grained mud. Used in over thirty-five Boston churches and known as Roxbury puddingstone, it was celebrated by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his 1830 poem, “The Dorchester Giant.”24 He attributed the odd stone composition to the giant’s three unruly children and a “pudding stuffed with plums.”

  They flung it over to Roxbury hills,

  They flung it over the plain,

  And all over Milton and Dorchester too

  Great lumps of pudding the giants threw;

  They tumbled as thick as rain.25

  After the children finished their roughhousing, Percy Raymond’s great trilobite appeared, roughly a half billion years ago. The foot-long crustaceans crawled around the shallow water of the Iapetus Ocean (Atlas’s father in Greek mythology), off the edge of the small Avalonian landmass. This microcontinent, akin to modern-day Madagascar, lay just west of Gondwana, far south in the southern hemisphere. And then Avalon, and its cache of trilobites, abandoned its point of origin near Africa and began to travel north on the plate tectonics highway.

  Around 450 million years ago, Avalon passed over a hot spot, or zone of weakness in the earth’s crust where heat escapes from the mantle, as now occurs in Hawaii and Yellowstone. This fiery Bunsen burner melted surrounding rock and generated a hot, dry alkali-feldspar-rich magma that punched its way into a trilobite-rich sedimentary rock. The Quincy Granite was born, although no one knows exactly where or when, noted Bailey.

  Avalon continued to glide north and west through the Iapetus, probably jostling with other terranes before docking on the eastern edge of North America sometime between 425 million and 370 million years ago. Another terrane rammed Avalon between 300 and 250 million years ago, followed closely by Africa and Europe. This was the final squeeze of the accordion and marked the penultimate stages of the closing of the trilobite-rich Iapetus Ocean and formation of Pangaea. The assembly of North America, at least in the east, was more or less over. Geologic quiet has dominated the east ever since, with a few big events, most notably the breakup of Pangaea, which started the continents on their journey to their modern locations.

  Because of this geologic calm, the Quincy Granite did not get beaten up. By not experiencing the trauma of continental collisions, great uplift, and weathering, or deep burial under later sediments, the Quincy Granite lacks joints and other zones of weakness and can form massive, magnificent blocks, which in 1825 had attracted the attention of Solomon Willard, the gallivanting Boston architect-engineer.

  Work began again on Bunker Hill Monument in April 1827, nearly two years after General Lafayette had placed the original cornerstone.26 (The box containing the bit of Plymouth Rock was reburied in a new cornerstone in the northeast corner.) One of the first things Willard had to do was to figure out how to lift the massive blocks. Working with local seaman Almoran Holmes, Willard designed a massive hoist, or derrick, which consisted of a single wooden pole and a movable boom, attached by a block and tackle. Cables facilitated rotation of the boom, changing its angle, which determined reach. Known as the Holmes Hoisting Apparatus, it had a reach of fifty feet and, with six horses providing power, could lift up to twenty tons. The derricks along the edge of the Granite Railway Quarry were based on Holmes’s design. Ironically, Holmes died several years later while using one of his own derricks.

  With Bryant’s railroad transporting blocks and the derrick lifting stones, workers were able to lay fourteen courses of the monument, a height of thirty-seven feet, by February 1829.27 And then the Bunker Hill Monument Association’s money ran out, work stopped, and all employees, including Willard, were laid off. During the work break, the Granite Railway’s owners decided to open a new quarry on land about a half mile closer to the Neponset than Willard’s quarry. That land, which Perkins and his fellow railroad owners had purchased in 1826 for ten thousand dollars, became the Granite Railway Quarry.

  Workers at Granite Railway Quarry, 1923.

  When work on the monument started again in 1834, the Granite Railway Quarry supplied the rock. Money ran out once more in November 1835, after the addition of eighteen courses. The obelisk-to-be stood at eighty-five feet.28

  Construction did not begin again until May 1841. In the intervening years, the association sold ten of their fifteen acres to raise cash.29 The final money came from a fair held in Boston in September 1840. Organized by the “inspiring influence and delicate hands of the gentler sex,” the fair netted over thirty thousand dollars on sales of a “variety of things to please the eye, to adorn the house or person, or to supply the common wants of life.”30

  Workers placed the final stone on the monument at six A.M. on July 23, 1842. A formal dedication took place on June 17, 1843, with 110 Revolutionary War veterans present, including ninety-seven-year-old Phineas Johnson, who had fought at Bunker Hill sixty-eight years earlier. The cost to build the monument was $101,680, basically on budget.31

  The best way to see the great obelisk is to follow the Freedom Trail from downtown Boston across the Charles River to Charlestown. Designated by a red line, either painted or made of brick, the trail winds for three miles through Boston and highlights many Revolutionary War sites, such as Paul Revere’s house and the Old North Church. After crossing the river, the red line heads up a small hill, bordered by a wind tunnel of brick,wood, and granite row houses.

  The narrow street leads to an open square at the top of the hill and more row houses. A final short flight of stairs enters the monument grounds, where you can look back at Boston and see the recently built Charles River Bridge, whose 270-foot-tall, cable-support towers were designed to look like the monument. Greeting you is a statue of Colonel William Prescott, who famously warned his men,“Don’t one of you fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” just hours after he had set up his defenses on the wrong hill; Bunker is higher and better situated for controlling Charlestown than Breed’s Hill. With a sword in his right hand and his left hand trailing behind warning his men to wait, Prescott stands ready to take on any soldier or park visitor.

  Behind Prescott and a metal gate towers the 221-foot-5-inch-tall monument. Its Quincy Granite building blocks are immense. Over 13.2 million pounds of stone make up the obelisk. The biggest stones measure 32 inches high by 90 inches long and weigh up to five tons. Unlike the King’s Chapel blocks, the Quincy Granite stones are smooth and matching in color, gray with a few dark streaks. Outside of lightning rods that run up two corners of the
obelisk, no other ornamentation mars the simple structure.

  To access the monument, you go into the visitor center, exit by a side door, and enter the obelisk. Spiraling up around the central column are 294 steps. In winter, water dripping from granite can create long icicles, whereas in summer, the monument is pleasantly cool. A handful of narrow windows—which occasionally contain birds’ nests—bring in both light and air. An open room made by the pyramid at the top has four small square windows that provide an unparalleled view of Boston and the surrounding area.

  Even before completion of the monument, its construction, as well as the development of the Granite Railway, led to granite finally becoming the preeminent building stone in Boston. Willard showed that large blocks could be used and transported, and by refining quarry techniques, he helped drive the price down by 75 percent.

  Willard’s work became “the standard for public building in Boston— monumental, severe, and permanent,” wrote art historian Jane Holtz Kay in Lost Boston.32 Designated the Boston granite style, the buildings were often massive, such as the 535-foot-long Quincy Market or Boston Custom House with its forty-two-ton columns that took fifty-five oxen and twelve horses to pull. Many of these early structures still bear the perforation marks of Tarbox’s plug and feather technique.

  As Boston grew in prominence, its leading architectural style spread. Customhouses in Savannah,Georgia; San Francisco; and Portland,Maine, used Quincy Granite. In 1836 Willard provided stone for the New York Merchants Exchange, designed by another former student, Isaiah Rogers. Quincy quarrymen also shipped millions of paving stones to New York (still visible in a few streets in Greenwich Village, SoHo, and TriBeCa), Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. (Vic Campbell said that one of the major paving stone suppliers didn’t actually quarry the stones, they simply collected waste from a quarry on the hill above their shop and cut it into paving blocks.) The hole in the Granite Railway Quarry began to grow.

  Other granite areas beside Quincy also prospered. Rockport quarries provided a dark gray rock, transported by sea. The pink Milford Granite ended up in the Boston Public Library and New York’s Penn Station, and granite from Chelmsford was floated down the Middlesex Canal to the state prison, where it was cut. Rocks were shipped around the country and to Cuba.

  Each of the New England states began to excavate, cut, and ship granite as well. By 1889, Maine had 153 granite quarries, including one in Vinalhaven that employed fifteen hundred people. Quarries in New Hampshire (now nicknamed the Granite State), Rhode Island,Connecticut, and Vermont (home of Barre, the self-proclaimed “Granite Center of the World”) generated everything from paving stones to a single block three hundred feet long, twenty feet wide, and six to ten feet thick.

  They all shared one characteristic—access to transportation. In Maine the quarries were situated on the coast. Vermont’s were near railroads, as were Connecticut’s, which also had quarries on rivers and the coast. In areas where transportation was a problem, builders used the stone locally and moved rock via carts over dirt or cobblestone roads.

  Granite continued to dominate as a building stone for many years, aided by its physical attributes. Because of the abundant feldspar and quartz, granite is twice as hard as limestone or marble, up to twice as hard as slate, and at least equal to and generally harder than sandstone, which is usually also made of feldspar and quartz grains. Because of the interlocked minerals, granite is significantly less porous than sandstone and limestone, and about equal in porosity to marble and slate. In the age before steel beams, when stone had to provide the only means of support, granite’s compressive strength made it essential for monumental structures.

  In the past two decades granite has again become popular, for many of the same reasons, although compressibility is less important with steel infrastructures. Homeowners desire it because of its hardness. (Slicing and dicing with a good sharp Henckels knife will scratch a marble countertop.) Now, however, granite from the United States has lost ground to that of Finland, China, Norway, Sardinia, and South Africa. Baltic Brown, Big White Flower, Blue Pearl, Rosa Beta, and Zimbabwe Black are some granites that now dominate the market.

  The Quincy Granite’s massive nature, as well as its dark color and ability to take a polish, helped make it a popular building stone until about the Civil War. As railroads spread, however, less expensive granite started to flood the market and undercut Quincy’s competitiveness. Devastating fires in Chicago and Boston further weakened demand by revealing that heat flaked and cracked granite. A second wave of demand for Quincy did rise in the 1880s and 1890s but not as a building stone. Instead, people wanted the dark granite for Civil War monuments and later for gravestones.

  The beginning of the end of the Quincy quarries began in World War I when people stripped them of iron and steel and scrapped the machinery to melt down for shipbuilding. Demand continued to drop and finally plummeted during the Great Depression. World War II sealed the industry’s fate, and in 1942 the Granite Railway Company folded. The final large quarry, Swingle’s, limped along until 1963.

  With the industry shut down, the Granite Railway Quarry and other nearby quarries filled with water. They became notorious as unwatched places for dumping cars, trash, and the occasional dead mobster. At least thirteen people died swimming, diving, and climbing in them. In the late 1990s, the police officially declared the Granite Railway Quarry a crime scene while divers searched for a young woman who they suspected had been murdered and dumped in the deep water. Instead, they located an Irish teenager, who had been missing for three years. Divers thought they saw another body but never found it despite draining the quarry. With the quarries finally dry, the land owners, the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC), decided to fill the hole and prevent water from seeping back in.

  Coincidentally, workers in Boston were digging an even larger hole and needed to dispose of their dirt. The MDC gladly accepted five hundred thousand cubic yards of clay and lightly contaminated soil from the Big Dig, as well as seven hundred thousand dollars in tipping fees. An additional 12 million tons of Big Dig dirt were used to fill in other quarries around Quincy and to make a twenty-seven-hole golf course, four Little League fields, two soccer fields, and luxury homes, complete with granite countertops. By 2002 the Granite Railway Quarry was safe, grass was growing, and 174 years of history were buried.

  3

  POETRY IN STONE—

  CARMEL GRANITE

  Here on the rock it is great and beautiful, here on the foam-wet

  granite sea fang it is easy to praise

  Life and water and the shining stones.

  —Robinson Jeffers, “Meditation on Saviors”

  A CENTURY LATER, at the opposite end of the continent from Bunker Hill Monument, another transformation occurred because of granite. This time,however, the stone affected just one man—the poet Robinson Jeffers. The granite so infused his life that it helped transform him from an insecure, mediocre writer to one of the great American poets of the twentieth century.

  Jeffers used granite to build his private residence and a forty-foot-high tower. He called the structures Tor House and Hawk Tower and referred to the granite as “sea-orphaned stone.”1 The rock came from the beach below his house, which stands on a low hill that rises from the Pacific Ocean in Carmel,California. Jeffers placed each granite boulder by hand, generally in the afternoon after he had spent the morning working on his poetry.

  In describing the changes in him, Jeffers’s wife, Una, wrote, “As he helped the masons shift and place the wind- and wave-worn granite I think he realized some kinship with it and became aware of strengths in himself unknown before. Thus at the age of thirty-one there came to him a kind of awakening such as adolescents and religious converts are said to experience.”2

  I first saw Tor House and Hawk Tower in 2002 from the road that runs along the water below them. Light green grasses, gray green shrubs and a few light gray boulders covered the slope leading from the road up to the stone buildin
gs, behind which stood a row of wind-shaped Monterey cypresses. The house was squat with a narrow line of windows just below a small triangle of brown roof. The tower was square, about half the width of the house, and topped by a square turret with two eyelike windows opening out to the ocean. The structures didn’t appear to have been built so much as to have emerged geologically from the hillside, as if Jeffers had used the nearby cliffs, seastacks, and outcroppings for blueprints.

  Hawk Tower, built in 1920–1925 by Robinson Jeffers, Carmel, California.

  Up close, the buildings sustained my first impressions of geology manifest as home. No two stones were alike and rarely did stones of the same size rest next to each other. Edges were not perfectly straight but looked weathered and eroded. Barnacles still covered some of the stones Jeffers liberated from the sea. Finger trails ran through the mortar, trace fossils of a man and his passion.

  Jeffers mixed small, large, and immense boulders in a planned but not consistent pattern. He anchored a corner of the guest room at Tor House on a mass of bedrock, which he called Thuban in honor of the ancient polar star. He spanned one window with a single boulder, another with several square rocks, and over the main entrance to Hawk Tower he placed a perfectly shaped wedge as a keystone.

  Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand wrote that Tor House “expressed more direct intelligence per square inch than any other house in America.”3 Jeffers expressed his connection to his house more poetically: “My fingers had the art to make stone love stone.”4 I know of no other person or building that better expresses the direct relationship between people and stone.

  I returned to Tor House in April 2006 to meet Aaron Yoshinobu, a geology professor at Texas Tech University. For many years, he has been probing various Jeffers archive manuscripts and photographs, as well as “mapping” the stonemasonry and geology of Tor House and Hawk Tower. “One thing I like about Jeffers’s work is that he talks about the importance of poets and artists creating things of permanence, of lasting value. You see that in the house and tower,” said Yoshinobu.5 “As a geologist, I relate to the intense connection and passion Jeffers found in rocks and mountains.”