Stories in Stone (23 page)

“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.

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.