Stories in Stone

by David B. Williams

  About the last process that required humans actually working with cutting tools was scabbling. Despite its success, Mr. Tarbox’s method was not perfect; many blocks broke off with projecting bumps, edges, and knobs. The scabbler’s job was akin to a plastic surgeon’s: Remove the offending irregularities and leave behind a smooth and beautiful face. But scabblers’ days couldn’t last forever, and by 1907 a machine utilizing disks with steel teeth had replaced the stone surgeons.

  With the rise of the machines and the spread of the railroad, Salem Limestone was on its way to becoming America’s stone. In 1877 twenty quarries produced 339,153 cubic feet of stone, roughly enough material to adorn one and a half Empire State Buildings, the most famous Salem-covered structure. By 1895 forty-eight quarries produced 5,368,307 cubic feet and by 1912 the number had risen to 10,442,304 cubic feet. Sales peaked in 1928 at 14.4 million cubic feet, about 70 percent of all exterior stone sold in the United States that year.

  Although saying this in front of a quarryman might not be prudent, modern quarrying looks rather boring compared to that of the past. Or as one quarry owner put it, “We were a lot tougher back then.” Gone are the Eiffel Tower-esque derricks with their head-cracking cables, body-skewering hooks, and bone-crushing dropped blocks. No longer do coal-powered channelers pollute the air with noxious fumes or ruin ears with incessant pounding. And in the most up-to-date quarries, no one swings a hammer. Technology has taken over the least technological building material in the world.

  Quarries now look like a young boy’s dream with oversized dump trucks carrying blocks the size of an SUV and massive front-end loaders cruising around the yards lifting, tipping, and stacking stone. Front-end loaders have also allowed quarries to tidy up because the machines can more easily move and stack blocks anywhere they need to be. But the big rigs have created a new hazard at quarries, the potential to be run over by a truck. “It’s the law of gross tonnage. Get out of their way,” said Jones as we sat idling in his pickup waiting for a mountainous truck to pass.

  Machines developed in the past few decades have further reduced the number of men working in the quarries. At the ILCO quarries, fewer than a dozen men worked on the stone. On the lowest level of the quarry, one guy drove a truck, two guys operated front-end loaders, and six guys worked on a recently turned block. Fifteen feet above them two men walked around the quarrying surface, which covered an area the size of a football field. Running the length of this surface were rows of crisscrossed channels. Several rows had been removed and the quarry resembled a half-eaten pan of limestone brownies.

  In bygone times, a channeler would have made these cuts, but at this quarry, as at all other quarries in the Belt, a diamond belt saw cut these lines. It looks like a chain saw fashioned for Paul Bunyan, with a 16-foot-long blade extending out of a white box the size of two telephone booths. Instead of a steel cutting belt, the blade has a 11.2-inch-wide polyurethane belt studded every 2 inches with raised metal plates. Microscopic diamonds encrust the stubby,T-shaped plates, which feel like sandpaper, gritty but not sharp. As the belt spins, the plates can cut through 16 feet of limestone at 4 inches per minute.

  These are the cuts that Todd Thompson and Brian Keith like because when the blocks are removed they leave behind a smooth face. “Yeah, it’s like kids in a candy factory when we get geologists in here,” said one quarry owner, when asked if he worked with geologists.

  The diamond belt saws require constant streams of water, which keeps the blade and belt cool while cutting. At the quarries water gushed out of the previously cut grooves and onto the quarry floor. Water also keeps the dust down. As with most quarries, water use requires the Indiana quarries to operate only in above-freezing temperatures.

  In addition to using specifically designed equipment, ILCO workers also borrow technology. The two guys walking across the quarry surface crisscrossed with channels were using a product originally developed for rescue workers: industrial air bags. The workers took gray air bags, about 2 feet by 3 feet, and dropped them down into the 13.4-inch-wide channel closest to the exposed, vertical face of the limestone. Each bag was connected to an air compressor that slowly inflated the bags. As the bags grew, the men dropped additional bags into the widening gap, until the 130-ton block tipped over and onto a pile of rubble on the quarry floor. Quarrymen call this “turning a cut.”

  Men then clamored onto the rock with hydraulic air drills. Bringing Tarbox’s technique into modern times, they drilled three twenty-inch-deep holes in a row and inserted a hydraulic expander, the arms of which spread and split the rock. “Our goal is to have no more guys swinging hammers,” said Jones. “We are one of the few quarries to use these expanders. They are faster and safer and split the rock more cleanly.”

  Other quarries still use hammers. On a turned cut, men drill holes only six inches deep and six inches apart, insert plugs and feathers, and hammer them into the rock. Because the plug and feather technique creates short drill holes, the ends of these blocks look like a grin of perfect teeth. These quarries sound different than ILCO’s. From a hundred yards away and above the sound of trucks, air compressors, and saws, it sounded like a chain gang working on a railroad as metal pinged metal when the men pounded the plugs.

  The end product of both the hammer and the hydraulics is the block. At nonworking quarries, they clutter the ground in haphazard mounds, as if the children of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Dorchester Giant had wandered west and continued to play. These blocks are the abandoned dreams of earlier workers. The stone may have had a flaw, such as fossils or a crack, or the quarry owners ran out of money and left behind a mess they had planned to clean up.

  Blocks also litter working quarries. They may form protective borders around active quarry ledges or sit in long-forsaken piles dotted with trees, but most spread across quarry yards in row upon orderly row. Indiana Limestone regularly has over twenty thousand blocks that cover an area one-third mile long by one-quarter mile wide.

  In a further nod to technology, every block at the ILCO yard has a bar-coded label telling the cutting date, grade, and color. Color is critical because the most valuable stone, buff, costs six dollars more per cubic foot than gray and twelve dollars more than the least expensive, variegated, a combination of buff and gray.12 To access information on the blocks, ILCO installed a wireless network across the twenty-three-hundred-acre site, so the workers could read the labels and transmit information back to the main office. “The system has really helped except that we had nonquarry people tapping into our network, so we had to give access codes to everyone on staff,” said Jones.

  Blocks are the basic unit of the building industry. Out of them will come the raw materials, such as panels, sills, and keystones, to be assembled into courthouses, homes, and skyscrapers or, if an artist gets the stone, sculptures, monuments, and statues. All the blocks need is someone to cut them open.

  Cutting takes place away from the quarry at a mill, also known as the fabrication or cutting facility. Here, too, diamonds play an essential role. No one, however, would court anyone with these diamonds. They neither sparkle nor shine. Nor are they rare, and most can barely be seen except with magnification. Cutting implements in use in the limestone industry contain diamonds ranging in size from three hundred to a thousand microns, no thicker than the proverbial one thin dime.

  Nor are these diamonds natural. Industrial diamonds are made in labs that replicate the high-pressure (fifty thousand times what we feel on Earth), high-temperature (twenty-two hundred degrees Fahrenheit) environment that forms natural diamonds. First created in the 1950s, most industrial diamonds originally came from factories owned by General Electric and DeBeers. Both companies still produce synthetic diamonds, but so do the former Soviet bloc countries, as well as China and India.

  Although mills in the Belt utilize the same basic technology, they take very different approaches. The ILCO mill is the most advanced, with many computer-programmed machines. It was eerily clean, as if the computers had
taken over, with no cables, wires, or trash visible in the large indoor facility. Only a few workers were doing much physical labor. One man sat complacently at his computerized control panel. He had only to watch and make sure nothing went wrong. The machine slid the block forward, lowered the guide bar, engaged the belt, and cut the block. In contrast, at a much smaller mill, the guy sitting outside and running the wire saw monitored it vigilantly. He may have been motivated by the several men crowded around a nearby wire saw that they had partially dismantled because it had started to miscut. He did have one advantage over the indoor stone guy: The noise produced by the stone screaming under the outside saw was not nearly as loud as at ILCO’s facility.13

  The big limestone slabs next get cut with diamond-tipped circular saw blades. The majority of limestone slabs end their trip through the mill after a couple of passes through a circular saw, resulting in some sort of product—slab, step, cap, or quoin—with squared edges. Most jobs require a single blade, but to fashion multiple, same-sized blocks, such as for thin veneer or treads, some slabs get ripped by gangs of up to twenty-two blades.

  “Operating the diamond saw was the easiest job,” said Bob Thrasher, who worked in the mills in the 1950s.14 “I could do it by ear, just listening to the stone until it was done, and then moving the block. I read the entire Bible, Old and New Testament, working on the diamond saw.” Judging from the stacks of books, newspapers, and New Yorkers in his home, Thrasher appeared to have kept on reading, despite losing an eye in the mill, when a wire snapped and hit him in the face. “My father worked in the mills, too. He quit one afternoon when he was loading a railroad flatcar with his boss and the chock came out. The car started moving and split his boss in two. Dad never went back.”

  Three common denominators stood out at the mills: Everyone was male and had on a hard hat and safety glasses. Beyond these similarities, they wore jeans, overalls, or shorts; earplugs or industrial ear mufflers; sneakers or steel-toed boots. There were wiry little guys and beer-bellied ones. A few looked as if this was their first post-high-school job, whereas some of the men looked old enough to have grandkids in high school. But no women. They were only in the offices. No one came out overtly and said they wouldn’t hire women, not that they would tell an outsider, but most questioned whether a woman could take the physical requirements of the jobs, either in a mill or in a quarry.

  The reliance on new technology hasn’t eliminated all the old tools. Some milling occurs in a world little changed from the industry’s glory days of the early 1900s. It is a world that relies on steel to shape stone, a world full of dust. (Fortunately for the workers, limestone dust, which is made of the same material as a Tums tablet—calcium carbonate—is much less harmful than granite dust, which leads to silicosis, a lung disease that killed many Quincy quarrymen.)

  For big jobs, the millmen turn to the planer, which employs a custom-cut sheet of steel to slide back and forth along the edge of a block and shave the stone. With a handful of passes, the blade transforms a rectangle of stone to a graceful scrolled molding. Planing such as this stands in stark contrast to the way granite is cut, because no blade, no matter what the material, could shave granite. It is too hard. But beneath the limestone, piles of shredded fossils accumulate, as if the rock is going back in time and returning to its prelithification state.

  “Every project requires us to make a new blade for the planer,” said Will Bybee, president of Bybee Stone.15 “We have a separate shop that just cuts new tools for us.” Bybee was standing in the company’s immense mill shed, at the north end of the Belt, on a spot where quarrymen have worked continuously since the Civil War. Inside the shed, it felt like time had fast forwarded several months to winter. A dappling of white covered every surface and gave the air a foggy feel reminiscent of early January mornings in Seattle.

  Although they weren’t working on any columns, Bybee pointed out the lathe they use to cut them. It operates on the same stone-shaving principle except that the stone also moves, or more specifically spins, as the blade slides along. Bybee’s lathe can fashion pieces up to nineteen feet long, from ten-foot-diameter columns to slender balusters.

  Abandoning the hypnotic planer, Bybee continued on to the most tool-intensive part of the mill, where stone carvers produce pieces no longer based on a straight line. Their work is basically a pointillist drawing in reverse, with the carvers creating their image bit by removed bit. Following lines they had penciled onto the stone and tapping carbide-tipped points and chisels, the men at Bybee’s hewed an acanthus leaf on a Corinthian column, sculpted a woman’s lips on a pool table–sized panel, and shaped egg-and-dart molding.

  Carvers require the most experience in the milling shed, with each man having completed seventy-five hundred hours working as a carving apprentice, preceded by six thousand hours as a stone cutter. Most also have three to five additional years working stone before graduating to cutter status. Carvers use some of the oldest tools on site, with many passed down from generation to generation. The workmen’s benches— called bankers—at Bybee looked like a chef’s kitchen with a spread of cutting tools, toothed, curved, flat, and pointed. Various hammers hung above the bankers, although several of the men carved with a pneumatic, or air, hammer, basically a power-driven chisel.

  “The carvers have the most freedom in working stone. About nine out of ten projects have no work ticket and require interpretation in 3-D,” said Bybee. Instead of the standard ticket, which includes precise measurements and drawings, the carvers may be given only a roughed-out sketch or a photograph of a piece they are restoring. The men then create drawings, mark out their blocks with pencil, and take up their tools. “Occasionally, someone doesn’t give us enough information but basically we can re-create any shape needed,” said Bybee.

  And those shapes last for decades upon decades, whether it’s a statue of comic-book hero Joe Palooka standing tall in Oolitic, row upon row of Corinthian columns adding prestige to government offices in Washington, D.C., garlands welcoming parishioners through the doors of St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church in Los Angeles, or incised letters designating the Alaska State Capitol in Juneau. Go to any city and you can find similar Salem structures.

  You will have to travel to Indiana, though, to find some of the more unusual and moving Salem carvings. They are the tombstones in cemeteries throughout the Belt carved to resemble tree stumps. At Green Hill Cemetery in Bedford, a six-foot-tall pair with interlocking broken branches memorializes Mammie Osborn Maddox and Alonzo Maddox. Stone flowers “sprout” from the base of her tree with ferns “growing” from the base of his. Nearby stands the tombstone of Hattie Wease, who died in 1912. Her tree stump rises from a stack of horizontal cut logs. Above her name are an ax and mallet, carved with precise detail into the stone.

  Other stumps depict vines climbing the bark, a lamb at the base of a child’s tomb, doves nesting on branches, or frogs hiding in foliage. Not purely decoration, each design has symbolic meaning. A broken branch represents a life cut short. A frog alludes to resurrection. Doves symbolize peace. These are shibboleths, codes that united individuals to a larger community. Even in death the residents of limestone country looked to stone to forge a common bond.

  One of the most famous tombstones honors Louis Baker, a twenty-three-year-old Bedford stonemason, who died August 29, 1917, when lightning struck him at home. His co-workers sculpted an exact replica of how Baker left his banker. On the upper edge of a slanted stone slab, supposedly the piece Baker was working on, they carved his metal square. Below rest a broad, flat chisel, called a drove, and a stub-handled broom, one edge of which abuts a foot-long pitching tool. A wider chisel leans atop a hammer that just touches the sharpened end of Baker’s point. Nearby is the apron he tossed onto his mallet. The slab sits on another slab, propped on a bench so perfect in detail of the wood that one of the boards “warps” and others have cracks where someone, perhaps Baker, had overtightened the bolts holding together the planks.

  The bench
reveals not only the qualities of Salem Limestone—ninety years of weathering have not erased the details of individual straws of the broom—but also the qualities of the men who worked the stone. To honor one of their own, the men of the Belt produced a monument that reflected gratification in working with simple tools, pride in their trade, and respect for their co-workers.

  Some people say we should thank Mrs. O’Leary’s cow for the popularity of Salem Limestone. Legend holds that her bovine kicked over a bucket that started the 1871 fire that forced Chicagoans to rebuild their city. As happened in most places that rebuilt after a fire, builders chose brick and stone for the job and within a year, several hundred buildings had “shot upwards like grass after warm spring rains,” as wrote a Chicago journalist.16

  The standard story line of historians and promoters of Salem Limestone is that the “buildings that suffered least from the fire were of limestone.”

  Tombstone of Louis Baker, Green Hill Cemetery, Bedford, Indiana.

  Newspaper accounts from the time, however, report that during the fire, limestone “seemed as though [it] actually burned like wood.”17 Builders were so prejudiced against the local stone, most of which came from nearby Joliet and Lemont, that in the first thirty days after the fire, most ordered brick, from as far away as Philadelphia. In the year following, builders worked extensively with sandstone from southern Ohio.

  Chicagoans in the 1870s, however, didn’t let wholesale destruction and poor-quality stone get in the way of politics and corruption, and soon the local limestones returned to their former prominence, most famously when the Board of Alderman chose Lemont stone for the new Cook County Courthouse.18 Promoted by its powerful supporters, the Lemont limestone stayed popular through the decade. A few builders did use Salem stone, but some of them, apparently not wanting anyone to know, stained their Salem rock to look like sandstone.