Stories in Stone (20 page)

Daily life in St.
Augustine continued to be a struggle with limited food (commonly eaten items were mullet, catfish, and gopher
tortoise) and delayed subsidies from Spain, although new governors would arrive and bring energy for construction and increased
trade and the town would prosper.
³³
One big change from the seventeenth century, however, was that Augustinians now knew that their little town was permanent;
they could always depend on the castillo as their fortress, not only as a deterrent but also as a refuge.
St.
Augustine also
started to get what might be called its first tourists.

“Augustin itself is widely known to be a healthy place, so that weaklings and consumptives from the northern provinces resort
hither, and always to their advantage,” wrote German botanist and explorer Johann David Schoepf.
³⁴
Schoepf made his observation during travels in Florida in the early 1780s.
Time, however, did not treat the town well.
When
John James Audubon visited in 1831, ten years after the United States acquired Florida, he wrote, “St.
Augustine is the poorest
hole in the Creation.”
³⁵
The castillo, or Fort Marion, as the Americans named it, must have impressed him because he used it as the backdrop for his
painting of the Greenshank, even though he shot the bird at the southern tip of Florida.
³⁶

Although no shots flew, the South (1861–62) and the North (1862–65) each controlled the fort during the Civil War.
After fighting
ceased, Fort Marion served as a prison for Great Plains and Apache Indians.
The grounds later became Florida’s first golf
course, when Henry Flagler, cofounder of Standard Oil, built his stunning Hotel Ponce de Leon in St.
Augustine.
The former
hotel, now Flagler College, was the first large-scale building constructed entirely of poured concrete; the walls look like
coquina because the builders used crushed coquina as an aggregate.

Flagler also built a railroad to town and began to promote St.
Augustine as a tourist destination.
The quiet hamlet became
the “Newport of Florida,” as Harriet Beecher Stowe described it.
³⁷
Visitors could buy coquina carvings and painted coquina from the “Coquina Man.” The St.
Augustine Historical Society offered
tours of the castillo.
Because the guides depended on tips, the stories became more fanciful with a torture rack, quicksand
pit, and secret dungeon taking over where truth ended.

The arrival of Flagler’s railroad had another consequence.
Now that the railroad could bring any stone builders wanted, coquina
faded as a building material, not to reappear again until Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal projects, which emphasized the use
of local materials.
In St.
Augustine, the New Deal led to construction of a civic center and a large hotel.
Daytona Beach
also incorporated coquina in two magnificent structures: a band-shell, now hidden by beachside condos and hotels, and the
Tarragona Arch, which on the day I visited was decorated with Christmas lights outlining a motorcycle-riding Santa.

Only one quarry now supplies coquina.
Located about four miles west of St.
Augustine, it is deeper than the surface deposits
of Anastasia Island.
Owner Gary Wilson says that he supplies stone for statues such as dolphins and turtles, and veneer for
new developments.
Clients have included two people one might not suspect of sharing a common interest: actor Burt Reynolds
ordered a carved Brahma bull and golfer Vijay Singh wanted coquina veneer for his home and guesthouse.
Coquina truly does
bring the world together.
³⁸

Wilson also supplies stone to the castillo.
Over the past few years, the park service has been engaged in a multifaceted restoration
process.
Workers have experimented with chemical methods to prevent plant growth on the coquina.
They have rebuilt sections
of the covered way stone walls and resurfaced the roof on top of the courtyard rooms to prevent water damage, although water
seepage continues to produce stalactites in some rooms.
Park employees are also using Wilson’s coquina to stabilize horizontal
surfaces in the fort.

Although most of these restoration projects focus on preventing water damage, the park service has no plans to do the one
thing that would best protect the fort and make it historically more accurate.
They will not re-plaster the building and restore
the historic white and red colors.
They claim that people would complain because they are used to the gray color of the castillo.
There is probably another reason.
They just don’t want to cover up the clams.

6

A
MERICA’S
B
UILDING
S
TONE—
I
NDIANA
L
IMESTONE

“We have under our feet the best building material God ever put

on Earth.
Because of that fact, this industry is as nearly eternal as you can get.
One hundred years from now, people will
still be hauling limestone out of this little patch of ground.
They may be shipping it on spaceships and light rays, but one
way or another they’ll be hauling it out of the ground and stacking it into the air.”

—Bill McDonald, as quoted in
In Limestone Country
,

Scott Russell Sanders

I cut the stone for this building .
.
.
I was proud of my work.
When
they were finished the darndest thing happened.
It was like the buildings
were too good for us.
Nobody told us that .
.
.
it just felt uncomfortable.

—Mr.
Stoller, in the film
Breaking Away

I
N SEPTEMBER 2007 I went in search of limestone.
My destination was Bloomington, Indiana, the heart of a region where limestone
has been quarried for almost two hundred years.
The stone was everywhere.
Green slate topped a few of the walls but basically
every rock was gray or buff limestone.
The highest rose sixty or seventy feet, smooth and cool to the touch.
Black lichens
covered the north sides of these clifflike faces and were especially prominent in areas where water had trickled down.
Other
walls made of broken slabs of limestone reached only as high as my waist.
On one an untidy line of flagstones stood perpendicular
to the horizontal slabs, looking like an upside-down photo of James Hutton’s famous unconformity at Siccar Point.
At the base
of the slabs, moss and ferns pushed out of crevices and added a beautiful verdant contrast to the buff blocks.
Towering above
this low wall were oaks and maples with a dozen red admiral and question mark butterflies sipping sap from the trunk of one
oak.

On another block of limestone someone had carved an intricate pattern of vines and leaves.
Whoever made the design used a
narrow chisel, its cutting grooves still visible in the soft stone.
Nearby the date
1890
had been chiseled eight inches high.
The numbers were remarkably crisp and sharp considering the area’s classic rock-unfriendly
climate of hot, humid summers and freezing winters, which typically ravage limestone.

Walking away from one high wall of rock, I followed a leaf-covered path through a wooded area of beeches and maples to a grassy
field and a low arch of smooth limestone.
When I got closer, I noticed fossils crowded together in several blocks of rough
stone on either side of the opening.
Afternoon light hit the fossils obliquely and they stood out from the softer substrate
like minute tombstones.
This graveyard of invertebrates entombed brachiopods, one-to two-inch-wide, clamlike shells; crinoids,
consisting of a cuplike calyx and thin ridged discs, some stacked five or ten high; and bryozoans, which resemble broken bits
of Rice Chex cereal.

Close-up of Salem Limestone, Maxwell Hall (1894),
Indiana University campus, Bloomington, Indiana.

Brian Keith, a geologist with the Indiana Geological Survey, calls these three animals the “holy trinity” of the Mississippian
Period.
¹
Brachiopods, bryozoans, and crinoids were some of the most abundant invertebrates living from 354 to 320 million years ago,
when a shallow, warm sea covered much of what we now call the Midwest and deposited the limestone.
With a 10
hand lens, I could see that the wall of fossils was completely made of shells, most of which had broken into pieces in the
fast moving tides that daily swept the ancient sea.

Although I would have liked to smash off a sample of this fossiliferous rock and take it home with me, I knew I couldn’t because
I was not in a wilderness or a semiwild spot.
I was on the Indiana University (IU) campus in Bloomington and I was sure that
the Hoosier faithful would look askance at someone, especially someone born in Kentucky, pecking away at one of the oldest
buildings on campus.

All but a few of the buildings on the IU campus, as well as many of the offices, banks, and government buildings in Bloomington,
are made from the stone menagerie known variously as Bedford, Indiana, oolitic, or Salem limestone.
The stone comes from a
thirty-mile-long-by-five-mile-wide area called the Indiana building stone district.
The Belt, as those in the trade call it,
stretches northwest from Bedford to Stinesville, about ten miles northwest of Bloomington.
Workers first used the stone in
1819, in the foundation and windowsills of the Monroe County Courthouse.
The men hauled the blocks eight miles, ironically
along an area later dotted with quarries and to a site resting upon extensive beds of limestone.
The first quarry opened eight
years later and builders have used Indiana limestone more or less continuously ever since.

When you walk through Bloomington and Indiana University you are in the center of the Salem Limestone universe—builders in
town tout limestone countertops instead of granite—but no matter where you are reading this book you do not have to travel
far to find what Brian Keith describes as the “premier building stone in the country.” Salem Limestone may face your local
government offices, make up the windowsills on a university campus, enclose the entryway to a bank, tower above as fluted
columns in a courthouse, or accent the dark granite on a high-rise office building.
As far as I have been able to determine,
the Bedford rock is the only building stone used in all fifty states.

The first building stone one of your relatives encountered in the United States was probably Salem Limestone, too.
The off-white,
fossil-rich stone trims walls and doorways at the immigration station at Ellis Island, built in 1900.
Open until 1954, Ellis
Island welcomed 12 million immigrants; over 40 percent of all Americans can trace their ancestry to those who walked through
the island’s Salem-framed doorways.
Perhaps a few geologically inclined emigrants backed up the line as they gazed thoughtfully
at the fossils.

You are probably even carrying with you a picture of a building that incorporates Salem.
Reach into your wallet and pull out
a bill.
If it is a five, a twenty, or a fifty, turn it to the back and look at the building.
The White House and U.S.
Capitol,
although not built originally of Salem rock, have used the limestone extensively for repair work, and Abraham Lincoln sits
on his marble chair surrounded by Salem Limestone.
²
And if you don’t carry bills, then you have probably mailed a letter from one of the more than 750 post offices built with
Salem blocks or perhaps paid a fine, obtained a marriage certificate, or watched a legislative session at one of the more
than two hundred Salem-sheathed courthouses or twenty-seven state capitols.

“So many monuments and landmarks are made from the Indiana limestone that it is a holder Of American memory,” says limestone
sculptor Amy Brier.
³
She is right.
Other stones are older, more beautiful, and have more noble pedigrees, but no other building stone forms as
much a part of the collective cultural fabric of the United States as the Salem.
No other stone has contributed more to giving
our cities and towns a sense of elegance and pride.
No other stone deserves to be called America’s building stone.

Three hundred and thirty million years ago, during the Mississippian Period, you could have sailed a boat across most of the
middle part of North America.
You would have floated over future Illinois, Kansas, Iowa, Colorado, Arizona, and Indiana, though
you would not have moved fast because you were in the windless zone of the globe we now call the Doldrums.
In addition, you
would have needed plenty of sun-block, as your boat would periodically cross the equator, which, because North America tilted
almost 90 degrees to the northeast, ran from about modern-day San Diego through Duluth,Minnesota.
In many areas, particularly
around Indiana, the water was less than twenty feet deep.

Geologists know all this because the equatorial sea deposited sediments preserved in rocks across the country.
At the Grand
Canyon, a several-hundred-foot-thick layer of rock known as the Redwall Limestone formed in this shallow sea and shares the
Salem’s brachiopods, bryozoans, and crinoids.
In eastern Colorado, geologists refer to their Mississippian Sea limestone as
the Spergen, but in Kansas and Illinois the name reverts to the Salem Limestone, named from early quarries near Salem, Indiana.

As you sailed along, you could have traveled north and west for many days without seeing any land.
Most of North America spread
to the east and northeast, as a lowland now called Wisconsin and Canada.
Far to the southeast, the eroding Acadian mountains
rose out of the water.
Staying in the south but moving west, you would have sailed off the platform of shallow water into
a deep basin.
The first landmass you would have seen was Gondwana, inching toward a collision with North America.
Another
range of mountains was also pushing up to the west, running at about a thirty-degree angle northeast from the equator.
These
mountains now stand in Nevada and are known as the Antlers.

Sailing along you would have noticed an additional facet of the water.
Like the Bahamas, where modern limestone forms in a
similar environment, the water would have been extremely clear because little or no sediment washed into the Salem sea.
Any
material that washed off of the mountains ended up in deep marine basins adjacent to the land.

The clear, warm, shallow water resulted in two characteristics of the Salem.
One, the building stone section is nearly pure
calcite, or calcium carbonate.
All of the organisms that lived in the water had calcium carbonate skeletons or shells, and
any sediment that accumulated consisted of calcium carbonate.
Two, many of the sediments were round, like fish eggs.
Known
as oolitic grains, they formed when wave action rolled a particle and surrounded it in concentric layers of calcium carbonate,
like what happens when you roll snow to build a snowman.
Over the millions of years the sea covered the continent, it generated
enough calcium carbonate to build up a ninety-foot-thick layer of limestone in Indiana.

If you had chosen to land on the shoreline abutting Indiana, the world would have seemed depauperate.
No birds or mammals
would have existed and the first dinosaurs were still almost 100 million years away.
A few four-legged amphibians had traipsed
out of the water, but scorpions, mites, spiders, and a host of insects would have dominated the terrestrial fauna.
Ferns and
low trees, including early conifers, would have formed extensive forests.
Another 200 million years would have to pass before
you could see the lovely deciduous trees that now flourish in Indiana.