Stories in Stone (26 page)

Bill Brown was not unusual in using nearby stone for building.
A lack of money and lack of good means of transportation often
drove the decision to go local.
Driving across country in 1996 through western Kansas, I remember being struck by the sight
of a sign welcoming us to Post Rock country.
After wondering if we had entered some midwestern enclave of Yanni fans, I started
noticing that fence posts along Interstate 70 were made from stone and not from wood.
Turns out that in a land of few trees
and many cattle, the best way to build a fence was to use the local limestone, a yellow-tan rock easily quarried from just
below the surface.
The post rock era ended in the 1920s, when farmers and ranchers began to use wood and steel, transported
by railroads and cars.

In cities, one of the easiest ways to find older local stones is to look for big building blocks.
Prior to the popularization
of steel infrastructures in the 1890s, builders relied on stone for structural support, which required building blocks large
enough to withstand the weight of tall structures.
Style could also dictate the use of massive blocks, particularly during
the era of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture and its emphasis on a natural, rough-hewn look for building materials.
Architectural
preference can complicate the picture during this period, the last quarter of the 1800s, but many who chose big blocks based
on Richardsonian principles still had to use what was nearby because of shipping costs.
For the most part large equals local.

I often take advantage of these early builders’ reliance on local rock to impress my friends when I travel.
All I have to
do is find the oldest stone buildings and I can get an insight into the local geology and have fascinating stories to tell.
(Of course, I could be misinterpreting my friends’ comments, such as “That’s great,David.
Why don’t you go do some more research
on that and find us later?”) Using this trick is particularly slick in urban settings, where most geology is long removed
or long covered by development.
For example, in downtown Seattle, which lacks any visible surface exposures of rock, most
of the old stone buildings were constructed with sandstone, which points to sediment-rich rivers as a former dominant regional
environment.

Others have used local buildings to learn more about local geology.
In the 1890s, while searching for fossils about ten miles
east of Medicine Bow, Wyoming, paleontologist Walter Granger chanced upon the remains of a cabin.
To Granger’s surprise the
sheepherder who built the cabin had used fossilized dinosaur bones for the little building’s foundation.
As he looked around,
Granger realized that dinosaur bones covered the hillside.
A year later he returned with a crew from the American Museum of
Natural History (AMNH) and eventually dug up the bones of sixty-four dinosaurs, including
Allosaurus
,
Apatosaurus
,
Diplodocus
, and
Stegosaurus
.
The AMNH men worked the Bone Cabin Quarry for six years and transported over 150,000 pounds of bone back to New York, making
the hillside one of richest discoveries of dinosaurs ever.
¹¹

The Wyoming sheepherder and others who incorporated local stone did so for practical reasons.
In the 1920s and 1930s, however,
builders started to incorporate unusual local rock for a different purpose, to attract that new breed of American, the motor
tourist.
Even in small towns, stone no longer had to be local; railroads could transport exotic rock to within reach of anyone
who desired it, but some business operators recognized that they could use their local stone to differentiate themselves from
their competition.

For seventeen years, Thomas Boylan had collected dinosaur fossils from the hills around his home, about six miles due south
of the Bone Cabin Quarry.
He had intended to assemble them into a complete skeleton, but when he consulted local paleontologists,
Boylan learned he had collected bones from a hodgepodge of species, “so I abandoned the idea and proceeded to use them the
best way I could,” he once told a reporter.
In 1932 Boylan decided to draw attention to a gas station he ran by erecting a
twenty-nine-foot by nineteen-foot building, which he built by cementing together the 5,796 bones he had scavenged.
He referred
to it as the Como Bluff Dinosaurium and the Building That Used to Walk.
Boylan, and later his widow, ran the gas station and
dinosaur cabin, which they converted into a museum, until the 1960s, when Interstate 80 replaced Highway 30 as a major thoroughfare
through Wyoming.

Boylan and Brown also promoted their enterprises by printing postcards.
Both attracted the attention of Robert Ripley, who
featured the buildings in his
Believe It or Not
column.
Brown’s card shows his station with no pumps, just a well-dressed woman and man.
Ripley mentioned the station in his
column on December 17, 1935, under the odd caption The Petrified Wood House, Built Entirely of Wood Turned to Stone.
¹²

Boylan’s card, labeled Petrifications on U.
S.
Highway 30 Como Bluff, Wyoming, shows that he spruced up the building by adding
a sign describing Wonderful Wyoming the Dinosaur Graveyard.
On the back, he described the “torpid reptiles” who “thrived in
torrid heat” and called the building a “5796 page book of creational hieroglyphics.” Ripley highlighted the cabin in his newspaper
feature on April 26, 1938, as the “Oldest” Building in the World.

Brown’s building made it back into Ripley’s again on September 21, 1991.
The new caption read, The World’s Oldest Building.
(From a geologic point of view, Brown’s building is made from older fossils than Boylan’s.) To be closer to the truth, Ripley
would be better off by referring to the Morton liquor store building as the “Oldest” Liquor Store in the World.

These stone structures exemplify a change in America that had started slowly at the turn of the century and by the 1920s was
rippling through the country.
It was a change based on new technology and a new natural resource, fostered by the relief of
winning a world war, and propelled by a rising stock market.
The change was quintessentially American.
Or as James Agee put
it in
Fortune
magazine in 1934, “So God made the American restive.
The American in turn and in due time got into the automobile and found
it good.”
¹³

In 1910 only five hundred thousand people owned automobiles, in part because nearly all of the country’s lanes, paths, and
thoroughfares began as routes for animal-powered vehicles, which were superior to gasoline-powered vehicles at negotiating
ruts,mud, and washouts.
With the addition of new road surfaces oriented toward cars, such as asphalt and macadam (invented
by Scotsman John McAdam), restive Americans were now able to go forth and drive, traveling on roadways with names such as
the Lincoln Highway, Black and Yellow Trail, Old National Pike, and Lone Star Route.
¹⁴
By 1920 over 8 million people had registered their cars; by 1927,
¹⁵
a Model T cost $385; and by 1929, every state had established gas taxes to pay for roads.
¹⁶

America had long been a nation of transients and travelers.
We liked to move and when trains came along we hopped on them
and went, but the automobile offered several significant advantages.
Motorists controlled their own destiny and didn’t have
to rely on someone else’s schedule or someone else’s limited routes and limited stops.
A family traveling in a car could stop
where and when they wanted.
Plus they traveled at a more human speed, not the blur-inducing, scenery-bypassing rate of a roaring
locomotive.
“More reliable and powerful than a horse, more personal and approachable than a train, the automobile seemed to
restore a human scale to machinery that had been lost with the onset of the steel age,” wrote Warren Belasco in
Americans on the Road
.
¹⁷

“After the autoist had driven round and round for awhile, it became high time that people should catch on to the fact that
as he rides there are a thousand and ten thousand little ways you can cash in on him en route,” Agee wrote in
Fortune
.
First and foremost in making money was selling gasoline.
Pumps appeared anywhere one could put up a storage tank, such as
hardware stores, general stores, and people’s homes.
Curbside pumps became ubiquitous taking their “place on the sidewalk
with the mailbox, the streetlamp, and the fire hydrant.”
¹⁸
By 1920 15,000 gasoline stations dotted the country and by 1930, 124,000 stations blanketed our gas guzzling land.
¹⁹
Station owners weren’t just dealing a commodity.
In the words of one enthusiastic spokesman, “it is the juice of the fountain
of eternal youth that you are selling.
It is health.
It is comfort.
It is success.”
²⁰

“The gas station .
.
.
is undoubtedly the most widespread type of commercial building in America,” wrote Daniel Vieyra in
Fill ’er Up: An Architectural
History of America’s Gas Stations
.
What had begun merely as a way to distribute gas evolved into a full-scale sales and service center.
Owners sold oil, lubricants,
tires, batteries, and accessories.
They added lifts and pits for oil changes and repairs.
Some owners also had separate rooms
for car washing.
Most had restrooms and many offered food, drink, and tobacco.
They had become the one-stop service station
so familiar to the American roadside.

As stations were transformed in the 1920s and 1930s, station design entered its golden age.
Vieyra describes four recurring
themes.
Most elegant were what he calls the Respectful buildings, which grew out of the City Beautiful movement and fostered
urban pride.
Many resembled Greek temples with columns and pilasters.
Others alluded to colonial designs, complete with cupolas
and pedimented porticoes, whereas in the southwest, stations took on a more Spanish adobe appearance.
All were supposed to
inspire the motorist to stop in and consume.

The second category was Functional buildings, catering to a motorist’s sense of efficiency.
The classic was Texaco designer
Walter Teague’s white box.
Clad in enamel, with three parallel green stripes wrapping around the building, clearly labeled
service bays, a glass-enclosed office, and in-door restrooms, the Teague box was streamlined, orderly, and incredibly successful.
All you have to do is go to your corner gas station and you will see how Teague’s design morphed into the modern box.

Domestic buildings, Vieyra’s third typology, satisfied those seeking a more familiar or rustic look.
Who wouldn’t want to
pull up to a small cottage, either Tudor- or otherwise English-inspired, and purchase gas?
The fuel
had
to be high-quality; the clean, folksy salesman emerging from his pastoral home wouldn’t mislead anyone.
Would he?
That’s certainly
what the gas companies hoped buyers would believe.

Domestic, Functional, and Respectful buildings did share one common theme.
Large companies designed them to promote a corporate
image.
They wanted travelers to know that when they saw a Texaco box in Tampa, Florida, or a Pure Oil cottage in Westerville,
Ohio, they would get the same good service they got from their local Texaco box or Pure Oil cottage.

Some station owners eschewed corporate branding and endeavored to attract motorists with whimsy.
They built stations out of
old planes and modeled them after lighthouses and windmills.
They made them look like tank cars, Brobdingnagian oil cans,
and colossal shells.
While some places showcased local themes, such as the World’s Largest Redwood Tree Service Station in
Ukiah, California, and a monumental Mammy with a giant, beehive skirt in Natchez, Mississippi, other locales turned to more
exotic imagery.
No pharaohs ever lived or died in Maine, but travelers in the 1920s and 1930s could buy gas from a series
of pyramid-shaped stations.
The same traveler could also go to Bardstown, Kentucky, and purchase fuel at a tepee, perhaps
the first tepee ever built in that part of the world.
Despite the cheesiness of the pyramids, one can argue that evoking Egyptians
in Maine is better than reinforcing stereotypes in the south.

Vieyra labels this architectural style Fantastic and delineates its golden age as 1920 to 1935.
Bill Brown may or may not
have known of these other fantastic structures when he came up with the plans for his petrified wood station, but his little
building was emblematic of the times.
Motorists didn’t know what to expect on the open road.
They were adventurers, seeking
new sights and new experiences.
Buying gas at a petrified wood gas station was part of the adventure; it was what restive
Americans wanted when they traveled.