Stories in Stone (4 page)

Commercial quarrying did not begin until the 1780s when several companies began working holes in and near James Stancliff’s
original Portland site.
By the 1820s three companies—Middlesex, Brainerd, and Shaler and Hall—had consolidated ownership of
the quarrying business, although Middletown citizens could still take rock from the Town Quarry.
The Middlesex and Brainerd
pits opened near the public hole and next to each other, separated only by the Portland town cemetery.
Shaler and Hall’s quarry
sat just downriver.

The companies also controlled the town, said Guinness.
Workers shopped at the company stores, using credit extended to them
by the company.
They lived in company housing and many prayed in a church built with stone provided by the companies.

The men worked from sunup to sundown with a midday break of one to two hours.
Work stopped for bad weather, holidays, and
haying.
Guinness noted that “going to the poorhouse, drunkenness, and wife’s jollification” also led to missed days, or at
least hours, depending upon the activity.
Typical wages in the 1830s ranged between $11 and $18 per month.
By the 1850s the
three companies had conspired to set a standard pay rate, which was $1.10 per day in 1854.
Wages peaked at a daily rate of
$2.50 in 1870, sliding back to $1.55 in the nationwide depression that followed.

Prior to the use of steam engines, men and beasts did all the work.
A full labor force topped out in the 1850s with between
twelve hundred and fifteen hundred men, 60 span of horses, and 120 yoke of oxen.
Surveyors determined where to quarry.
Rock
bosses supervised a crew of blasters, cutters, and haulers.
Teamsters controlled the oxen and horses that moved the stone
within and out of the quarry.
Measurers ensured the size of each stone that left the quarry, and blacksmiths tended wagon
wheels, picks, drills, and other iron and steel implements.
All the while, a diligent timekeeper tracked the comings and goings
of the men.

After 1850 the workforce began to shrink, a consequence of quarry owners adopting new technology as soon as it became available,
said Guinness.
Pumps allowed the quarries to drop below river level by removing excess water.
Steam-powered derricks could
more easily remove rock from the depths than could animal-powered carts.
Derricks also raised and lowered men and oxen.
New
motorized tools such as jackhammers required fewer men to operate them, while three miles of narrow gauge railroad track and
several locomotives made moving stone and cranes less labor intensive.
By 1896 only two yoke of oxen remained and about half
the number of workers as had been employed in the 1850s.

After the stone had been cut, quarrymen loaded blocks onto shallow-draft schooners called stone boats, or brownstoners, for
the thirty-mile trip south on the Connecticut River to Long Island Sound.
Towed down-river by steamboat, stone boats reverted
to wind power in the sound.
A typical trip on the Connecticut River took eight to twelve hours.

Weather controlled the work season, which started after the thaw.
Because the quarries spread out next to the river, spring
flooding could also dictate when the men worked.
For example, on May 4, 1854, the Connecticut River overflowed and completely
filled the quarries.
It took ten days to pump out the water.
The season ended when boats could no longer travel on the iced-over
river.

Cold weather also affected the stone.
When first quarried, it was saturated with moisture, called sap by quarrymen, which
could destroy a rock in freezing weather.
During summer and fall, quarrymen seasoned the blocks by covering them with soil
and letting them dry for four months.
Seasoning case-hardened the stone by allowing dissolved calcite or silica to move with
the sap to the surface, where the minerals deposited a new, stronger coating.
In later years, during the height of brownstone
popularity, demand was so great that quarrymen didn’t have time to let the rocks season, which resulted in poor quality stones
that helped ruin brownstone’s reputation.

And good stone was key.
Of the ten million cubic yards of rock removed from the quarries about half was waste, dumped outside
the quarry.
The quarries annually generated up to two million cubic feet of rock during peak production years, equally divided
between high-quality stone, including unseasoned rock, and stone used for nonarchitectural purposes, such as abutments and
piers.

Oddly, no stone quarried in Portland was cut and trimmed in town, except for local projects.
Most stone was shipped raw to
New Jersey or New York for cutting and dressing until 1884 when E.
I.
Bell established the Connecticut Steam Brown Stone Company,
where masons used diamond saws, gang saws, planers, lathes, and a rubbing bed to slice, carve, and finish everything from
entablatures to steps to balustrades.

The adjacent Brainerd and Middlesex pits eventually reached down two hundred feet.
They became one big hole in the 1870s when
the companies purchased the Portland town cemetery, which formed a hundred-foot-high ridge between the quarries.
The graves
and gravestones—the oldest stone dates from 1712—were moved and now rest a couple miles away at the Episcopal church.
All
that remains of the ridge is a low, tree-covered peninsula that extends out into the lake that fills the quarry.

Bad weather finally killed Portland’s quarrying industry, which had been on the decline since the early 1900s and silent since
the 1920s.
In 1936 record high water on the Connecticut River flooded the pits.
Two years later, a hurricane helped push the
river back into the quarries, which have remained flooded ever since.
A local company now has the rights to lead diving tours
into the quarry lake, which is about 600 yards long by 350 yards wide.
Guinness has heard rumors that two train engines might
be in the hole, but no one knows all that rests on the bottom of the quarry.
In recent years, cleanup crews have removed forty
tons of trash, including eight motorcycles, four cars, and sixteen air conditioners, but no trains.

The water-filled quarry now sits a couple hundred feet from the edge of the Connecticut River.
Originally the holes were adjacent
to the river but quarrymen had simply dumped waste over the western edge of the quarry and created a landfill.
Massive baby
blue oil tanks and a parking lot guarded by a pair of Rottweilers take up much of the new land.
Sumacs, sycamores, and locusts
grow on the cliffs above the quarry, their russet, yellow, and red leaves complementing the blue water and brown sandstone.

Few people thought much about the quarries until the mid-1980s, when developers wanted to cut a channel to the river and open
a marina in the lake.
They would have been successful except the bottom dropped out of the real estate market and the developers
went bankrupt, said Guinness.
With her prompting, the city of Portland finally bought the three quarries and adjacent land
in 1999 and 2000.
They plan on developing the site with trails, educational exhibits, and recreational uses.
In April 2000
Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt designated the quarries as a National Historic Landmark.

Site of Middlesex and Brainerd quarry,
now flooded, in Portland, Connecticut.

New Yorkers didn’t initially care for brownstone, using it only for building details.
For example, the city’s oldest church,
St.
Paul’s, built in 1766, is made of 450-million-year-old Manhattan Schist with brownstone quoins, a patio, and columns.
The earliest known wall of solid brownstone is part of City Hall (1803–1812), located just north of the financial district.
A guidebook published at the time called it “the most prominent and most important building in New-York.
It is the handsomest
structure in the United States; perhaps of its size, in the world.”
²³
Hyperbole aside, City Hall is an elegant edifice with a columned entryway, broad stairs, and a slender dome with a skin of
white marble from Massachusetts.
The builders also used marble on the south, east, and west exterior walls.
On the north side,
however, the exterior was brownstone, used because no one, or at least no one of any importance, lived north of the building.
Those who did either wouldn’t know any better or wouldn’t mind looking at what builders considered to be a cheap substitute
for more classically correct marble and limestone.
²⁴

As Alain de Botton noted in
The Architecture of Happiness
, for over one thousand years “a beautiful building was synonymous with a Classical building, a structure with a temple front,
decorated columns, repeated ratios and a symmetrical façade.”
²⁵
Classical architecture began with the Greeks, continued with the Romans, and, following a thousand-year hiatus, reemerged
during the Renaissance.
The stones of choice for most of the great buildings of antiquity and the Renaissance were marble
and a type of limestone known as travertine.
How could an architect turn against such a simple equation of beauty?

In New York City in the early to middle 1800s, few architects bucked the tradition.
Instead, the change came from laypeople.
When Richard Upjohn proposed limestone for Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan, the congregants chose brownstone.
Completed
in 1846, Trinity Church was the first important building with solid brownstone walls.
²⁶
Charles Lockwood, in
Bricks and Brownstone
, argued that the wealthy, well-read members of the church chose the somber stone because they were at the forefront of the
rising Romantic movement, best exemplified by the writings of Andrew Jackson Downing, a nurseryman and one of America’s first
landscape designers.

Downing’s most influential book was
The Architecture of Country Houses
, published in 1850.
“No person of taste, who gives the subject the least consideration, is, however, guilty of the mistake
of painting or coloring country houses white .
.
.
In buildings, we should copy those [colors] that she [nature] offers chiefly
to the eye—such as those of the soil, rocks, wood, and the bark of trees .
.
.”
²⁷
Downing died in 1852, but his influence continued with his architectural collaborator Calvert Vaux and with Vaux’s design
partner, Frederick Law Olmsted, codesigner with Vaux of New York’s Central Park.
The development of gas lighting further enhanced
brownstone’s reputation because the stone masked the soot produced by gas and coal.

During the 1850s a brownstone fog began to creep across New York.
It spread northward through Manhattan as the city grew.
It swelled across Brooklyn as the borough became a fashionable suburb.
It responded to fashion, changing from Greek Revival
to Gothic to Italianate.
It responded to money, initially facing row houses and later covering mansions.

Many quarries in addition to Portland opened in response to the growing popularity of brownstone.
Most were in the great rift
valleys formed during the splitting apart of North America and Africa.
Five companies quarried in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts.
Hummelstown, Pennsylvania, quarries supplied stone across the state and down to Baltimore.
Quarries in northern New Jersey,
primarily along the Passaic River in Little Falls, Paterson, and Belleville, provided stone for many institutional buildings
in Manhattan, including Trinity Church.
All of these quarries produced a rusty red sandstone, sold as brownstone, but none
sold as much rock as the quarry in Portland.

The march of brownstone-fronted row houses coincided with a tripling of New York’s population between 1840 and 1870, from
three hundred thousand to nine hundred thousand.
It also overlapped with the growth of an emerging middle class, who wanted
to show their prosperity—and a brownstone perfectly served that purpose.
For those who couldn’t afford an entire building,
which included many since the structures were so big, they could rent a floor and assume the guise of wealth.
Those on the
outside looking in wouldn’t know if a resident lived on one or many floors.