Stories in Stone

by David B. Williams

  Recognizing that they needed to counter the influential Chicago stone interests, several Indiana quarrymen began to get creative publicizing their stone. One promoter distributed small pieces of Salem Limestone cut into paperweights and vases to architects and contractors. Another enterprising booster wrote, “This purity insures absolute integrity on exposures to the fumes of coal, while the perfect elasticity and flexibility of the mass render it invulnerable to the forces of cold and heat, air and moisture.” Others claimed that the stone cleaned itself and that it had withstood the ice age “scarcely changed in any part.”19 If you don’t have money and power, then stretching the truth works well, too.

  The true qualities of the Salem—durability, accessibility, and ease of cutting—ultimately proved superior to the local limestones. Furthermore, the fast pace of reconstruction overwhelmed the Chicago area quarries to the benefit of the quarrymen of Indiana. By the mid-1880s, architects such as the high-profile firm of Sullivan and Adler had begun to use Salem regularly, most prominently on their Chicago Auditorium, built in 1887. Others followed, demand grew, limestone-laden trains bore north, and Salem buildings spread across the Windy City.

  Chicago wasn’t alone. The first train car of Salem had reached New York in 1879. In the same year, William K. Vanderbilt chose Indiana stone for the first of the great Vanderbilt mansions. Architect Richard Morris Hunt later selected Salem Limestone for Cornelius Vanderbilt’s “The Breakers,” in Newport, Rhode Island, William Astor’s Manhattan mansion, and George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore House, in Asheville, North Carolina. Putting today’s megamansions to shame, Biltmore required nearly 10 million pounds of limestone. With New York leading the way, others followed, and railcars carried block after block to Philadelphia, Boston, Kansas City, and Minneapolis.

  An additional and significant boost came in 1893 with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the fair that had hastened the end of the long reign of brownstone. Daniel Burnham’s White City reestablished white as a building color and reinvigorated classical architecture. Combined with landscape architect Frederic Law Olmsted Sr.’s refined fairgrounds,Burnham’s buildings helped popularize what became known as the City Beautiful movement. Cities around the country began to look at how they could refine green spaces and public buildings to create a more dignified and cohesive vision.

  Both marble and limestone suited the demand for the cut and carved features that paid homage to the elegance of Greek and Roman buildings, but limestone was cheaper and more accessible than marble, though it was more expensive than the white-painted wood used at the World’s Fair. With Salem Limestone you could get the look without paying the price of the more classically correct marble.

  Few cities were more successful in adopting City Beautiful ideals than Washington, D.C. Numerous marble-clad buildings did rise, and had been rising in D.C. for decades, but around the turn of the century blocks of Salem began to arrive in the capital. The first all-Salem building went up in 1911 and the Hoosier stone soon became “the workhorse of the building stones of official Washington.”20 Like the nameless bureaucrats who tallied our taxes, protected our parks, and doled out political favors behind the Salem walls, the stone did its job with little fanfare. Salem quarrymen also benefited in 1915 from the passage of federal legislation that required post offices having gross receipts between sixty thousand and eight hundred thousand dollars to have facing of sandstone or limestone, which led to more than 750 Salem-skinned post offices.

  Not everyone was pleased with the success of Salem. Senators from other stone-producing states complained that because the chair of the House Buildings and Grounds Committee, the assistant secretary in charge of the Treasury Department’s Procurement Division, and the Senate majority leader all hailed from Indiana, these honorable men may have showed some favoritism. Minnesota Senator Thomas Schall went so far as to propose a resolution requiring all monuments and public buildings to be made from granite or marble, no matter the cost.

  Schall didn’t need to worry. Although two of the biggest contracts for Salem rock, each of which totaled two thousand carloads of stone, came during the Depression, Indiana’s stone output declined rapidly after its peak in 1929. During World War II, several hundred thousand cubic feet of Salem was used for the Pentagon, but by the 1950s quarries and mills had begun to close down, permanently. A central reason was the rise of modernism and its use of “glass and whatever,” as one modern Salem promoter told me. Architects Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier preached simplicity and lack of ornamentation; their buildings didn’t need a material that could be carved and cut into flowery shapes.

  Small orders trickled in, but for the next three decades the industry remained stagnant and depressed.21 The OPEC oil crisis, however, was a turning point. People began to realize the importance of energy efficiency, that glass leaked like a sieve, and that stone required less energy to produce and once on a building was more efficient. The industry has been mostly steady since then.

  The quarries of Indiana continue to extract stone, and the mills of Indiana continue to cut and carve Salem Limestone in all shapes and sizes. The men of the Belt are leaner and more technology driven than in the heyday of limestone in the early 1900s, but they still produce a classic building material. Their product isn’t flashy. It’s not colorful or sensuous. “The Salem Limestone doesn’t deny it’s a stone. You don’t put up a building with limestone to express anything but permanence,” says sculptor Dale Enochs.22 “The Salem isn’t a screaming, sexy material. It has humility. I liken it to Indiana. It’s part of us.” It is also part Of America.

  7

  POP ROCKS, PILFERED FOSSILS,

  AND PHILLIPS PETROLEUM—

  COLORADO PETRIFIED WOOD

  Here is a building worthy of study . . . worthy of a visit or many visits to see and observe these marvelous trees . . . they stand to remind you of the ancient ages long ago, and to serve you with the modern fluid which is the vital touch of our ultra modern motor-age.

  —Joseph Walter Field, Lamar Daily News

  TWO CARLOADS OF rocks arrived by train in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in July 1939. From a distance they looked like nondescript stone, but up close one could detect something special. They weren’t just rocks, they were dozens of pieces of petrified wood, so well preserved that one could count tree rings and see the fossilized bark, insect borings, and ancient knots. Most of the fossil logs were tan to white but some had been stained red to orange. The petrified wood stumps averaged three to four feet in length and thirty to forty inches in diameter.

  Frank Phillips, Bartlesville’s most famous citizen and founder of Phillips Petroleum, had purchased the petrified wood. It had come from a dry wash that cut across a windswept grassland about twenty-five miles south of Lamar, Colorado. The wash was a good place to find petrified wood because intermittent stream flows eroded the rocky walls of the sandstone drainage and exposed the harder, more erosion-resistant fossilized logs. In addition, the open, rolling terrain around the wash meant that trucks could easily reach the heavy pieces of petrified wood. This was critical because the longer pieces weighed over a ton.

  Few, if any, people in the small town of Lamar knew that Phillips had commissioned the delivery to Bartlesville. The supposed buyer of the fossils was a man named B. R. Teverbaugh, who was working with Ted Lyon, Phillips Petroleum’s division manager in Wichita, Kansas. Teverbaugh, in turn, had hired A. H. Matthews of Lamar to locate the petrified wood. On June 13, 1939, Teverbaugh, in a letter marked PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL, wrote to Phil Phillips, nephew of Frank Phillips, “The writer handled this through a friend we have in Lamar, Colorado, so that it will not be known who was desiring the petrified wood.”

  Teverbaugh further noted in his letter that he and Lyon had tracked down the land’s tenant, but that the Federal Land Bank of Wichita, Kansas, now owned the mortgage. To increase the likelihood of getting the wood at a low price, Teverbaugh and Lyon told the bank that they were the ones who want
ed the fossils.

  Teverbaugh also traveled down to the property Matthews had found to take a look for himself. He thought that there weren’t many good specimens but that they could get twenty to twenty-five tons of wood, which they offered to buy from the bank for thirty-five to fifty cents per ton. Anything higher and the two poor men wouldn’t be “in the position to take” the wood, wrote Teverbaugh.

  Better examples of petrified wood had been found in the area, Teverbaugh reported, but someone else was already using the material. That someone else was Bill Brown, who had recently built a small gas station in Lamar out of petrified wood.

  Brown’s station was the driving force for Phillips’s pursuit of the petrified wood. He had found out about the building because Brown had leased it to Phillips Petroleum. Phillips then tried—again on the sly—to buy the building and move it to Bartlesville, but Brown found out the buyer’s identity and jacked up the price, and Phillips, who was notoriously cheap, refused to buy. Instead, he decided to purchase his own petrified wood and ship it to Oklahoma, where he would build his own gas station.

  Teverbaugh struck a deal for 48,045 pounds of petrified wood, paying $24.20, twice his initial offer. In early July he had the wood shipped by train to Bartlesville, more than 375 miles from the Lamar source. Phillips’s parsimony surfaced again and the petrified wood sat unused at his country estate, known as Woolaroc, for decades until workers made it part of a sculpture in an outdoor pond. In contrast, Bill Brown’s petrified wood building remained a landmark for years, and although it hasn’t been a gas station for decades, it continues to attract and inspire visitors.

  Brown’s gas station stands at the north end of the main business street in Lamar, a community of eighty-three hundred in Colorado’s southeast corner. The town is quiet and well kept and is more reminiscent of Kansas—flat, rural, and surrounded by treeless plains—than Colorado. Located along the historic Santa Fe Trail, Lamar has long been more a passing-through point than a destination.

  Finding the station can be challenging, particularly when the building’s present owner, who sells tires and used cars, parks three massive SUVs in front of it. It’s a good thing he doesn’t sell RVs, as even a medium-sized one would completely hide Brown’s fifteen-by-thirty-five-foot structure. The best time to see it is early in the morning when the low angle of the sun makes the building with its crenellated roofline seem enchanting, as if it had been erected for a fantasy movie. No wonder Frank Phillips wanted to take it home with him.

  Made from several hundred pieces of petrified wood, the station looks as if it had recently emerged from the earth. The dominant color is tan to dark brown, although black, milky white, and rusty red pieces also dot the structure. On one piece on the side of the building, the end of a five-inch-wide, blackened branch protrudes out from a trunk. Another log forms a Y where it has split into two branches, and below the front window is another stump, its rings a dark carnelian against a rusty tan background.

  Brown used his biggest logs of petrified wood in front. Two three-foot-diameter pieces flank what had originally been the bay where cars entered for lubrication and washing. The larger of the two weighed over thirty-two hundred pounds, according to a newspaper story written when the station opened. Brown also took advantage of two big logs to inscribe them with his name. Other mammoth trunks stand on either side of the front window and at the ends of the building. Brown incorporated one crooked fossil log as a waterspout. Along the top he placed many pointed pieces, giving the station the look of a turreted castle. Most of the blocks on the north side are about the size of lunch boxes; Brown used bigger logs on the south end. Nearly every piece of exterior petrified wood is in an upright position, like a standing tree. The average piece is at least a foot across and two feet tall.

  The few pieces of wood that aren’t upright are the ones used inside the building, on what one early writer called the “oldest ‘hardwood’ floor in the world.” Unfortunately, a dingy gray carpet scattered with fallen slabs of ceiling tile covers all of the stone floor except for where the front door opens. The interior doesn’t look anything like it did during the early years of the gas station. The present owner chopped off the back twenty feet of the building, which was not made of petrified wood, and now uses what is left for storage. Two pianos, a baby carriage, broken chairs, a computer monitor, and cardboard boxes have replaced the snacks, tires, lubricants, bathrooms, and service bay of old.

  Brown chose his best piece of petrified wood for the lintel above the front door. In the middle is the base of a two-inch-wide branch that looks as if it had recently been snapped off so it wouldn’t thump you when you entered the door. To the right are a series of holes that must have been made by insects when the tree was still alive. Around the holes the stone is a pale tan to reddish color that I associate with recently downed wood where the bark has been peeled away. Below this barky region, the stone is gray and weathered looking. You have to reach up and touch the petrified log to make sure it’s not real wood.

  Walking around the building, you can see another notable feature. Between the petrified logs on its north side, the mortar is green and raised as if someone did a poor job of caulking the seams. Judging from the consistent style used throughout the building, it seems the entire structure must have had green mortar, but it has almost completely faded on the south and east sides. Coloring the mortar green was not Brown’s idea, although a newspaper article written at the time implies that it was. A young man building the gas station for Brown thought the colored mortar would give the appearance of vines climbing the stone trees.

  We know about this young man only because of the fame he achieved after leaving Lamar. His name was Bill Mitchell and he later went on to invent Cool Whip,Tang, and Jell-O. He also developed, by accident, one of the great candies of my youth, Pop Rocks. I still remember the rumors kids passed along of how other kids had eaten Pop Rocks, drunk a soda pop, and exploded. Mitchell’s daughter said that her father spoke with fondness of the summer he worked on the station. “I think he thought it was a special time,” she said.

  Mitchell’s story of working on Brown’s building compounds one of the confusing aspects of the gas station’s history. In a letter Mitchell sent to the Lamar newspaper in 1978, he wrote that he worked on the building in the summer of 1930 or 1931. Other articles, pamphlets, and Web sites state that it was built in 1932. The assessor’s records show the gas station was constructed in 1933, as does one of Brown’s stone-incised inscriptions. No notice of the building, however, appeared in the Lamar news-paper until an article dated September 20, 1935, heralded its imminent completion.

  “There are so many features involved in this unusual filling station that it takes a few minutes to properly sense its unique position. An all wood building approved in the fire zone, because it cannot burn! An all wood building with scarcely a piece of wood in it . . . THE ONLY PETRIFIED WOOD FILLING STATION IN THE WORLD!” wrote Joseph Walter Field on the front page of the Lamar Daily News. “Can you imagine the thrill of realizing a lifelong ambition, a dream of years, materializing before your eyes? Well, this is the way Brown feels as he sees this unique building nearing completion.”

  After finishing the station and signing his lease with Phillips Petroleum, Brown leased the station to others, who ran it. Two of those lessees were brothers Gene and Blynne Smith. “Service was much more formal then. Gene always carried a tire gauge and chamois in his pocket,” said Dorothy Smith,Gene’s widow.1 “When someone pulled up, he’d rush out, check the air in the tires, the oil, and water in the radiator. He also washed the windows.”

  No matter when the station was built, it was big news in Lamar. The town, like the rest of the country, was in the middle of the Great Depression. Lamar would soon achieve some notoriety because of photographs of titanic storms of black dust raging across the county and out toward Kansas and Oklahoma, but its main claim to fame prior to the gas station was the infamous Fleagle Gang robbery of May 1928, which left four men d
ead following the holdup of Lamar’s First National Bank. After a yearlong, nationwide manhunt, the police and FBI captured one of the gang members, using evidence from a fingerprint he left on a getaway car. The Fleagle Gang case is the first where the FBI used fingerprints to convict a criminal. All four members of the gang eventually died on the gallows.

  William Brown’s gas station, Lamar, Colorado.

  For Brown, the station fit into his long-term role as a town booster. He had sponsored Lamar’s first swimming pool, helped start a chapter of Rotary International, and co-owned the first radio station. He employed over a hundred people at his family’s business, the Brown Lumber Company. The gas station was a logical next step in drawing attention to Lamar. The newspaper also reported that Brown had purchased 480 acres of land around the petrified forest where he obtained his building supplies and that he planned to develop the area as a tourist attraction.

  No one, however, has located any record of Brown’s purchase of the land. Eighty-one-year-old Lamar veterinarian Elmer Sniff e-mailed me that Brown stole the wood from private property. “My family made several Sunday afternoon trips to the ‘Petrified Forest’ in the ‘Little Cedars,’ about twenty-five miles south of Lamar,” wrote Sniff. “Our only admonition was to never take any of the petrified wood and spoil the pristine nature of the area. However, not everyone felt this way.” Several other Lamar natives confirmed that Brown had not necessarily acquired his petrified wood via traditional, legal methods. Ironically, Field wrote in his cover story about the building that Brown built it because of the “added threat that these [petrified remains] might be permanently lost to the region.”