Stories in Stone (8 page)

Workers at Granite Railway Quarry, 1923.

When work on the monument started again in 1834, the Granite Railway Quarry supplied the rock.
Money ran out once more in
November 1835, after the addition of eighteen courses.
The obelisk-to-be stood at eighty-five feet.
²⁸

Construction did not begin again until May 1841.
In the intervening years, the association sold ten of their fifteen acres
to raise cash.
²⁹
The final money came from a fair held in Boston in September 1840.
Organized by the “inspiring influence and delicate hands
of the gentler sex,” the fair netted over thirty thousand dollars on sales of a “variety of things to please the eye, to adorn
the house or person, or to supply the common wants of life.”
³⁰

Workers placed the final stone on the monument at six A.M.
on July 23, 1842.
A formal dedication took place on June 17, 1843,
with 110 Revolutionary War veterans present, including ninety-seven-year-old Phineas Johnson, who had fought at Bunker Hill
sixty-eight years earlier.
The cost to build the monument was $101,680, basically on budget.
³¹

The best way to see the great obelisk is to follow the Freedom Trail from downtown Boston across the Charles River to Charlestown.
Designated by a red line, either painted or made of brick, the trail winds for three miles through Boston and highlights many
Revolutionary War sites, such as Paul Revere’s house and the Old North Church.
After crossing the river, the red line heads
up a small hill, bordered by a wind tunnel of brick,wood, and granite row houses.

The narrow street leads to an open square at the top of the hill and more row houses.
A final short flight of stairs enters
the monument grounds, where you can look back at Boston and see the recently built Charles River Bridge, whose 270-foot-tall,
cable-support towers were designed to look like the monument.
Greeting you is a statue of Colonel William Prescott, who famously
warned his men,“Don’t one of you fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” just hours after he had set up his defenses
on the wrong hill; Bunker is higher and better situated for controlling Charlestown than Breed’s Hill.
With a sword in his
right hand and his left hand trailing behind warning his men to wait, Prescott stands ready to take on any soldier or park
visitor.

Behind Prescott and a metal gate towers the 221-foot-5-inch-tall monument.
Its Quincy Granite building blocks are immense.
Over 13.2 million pounds of stone make up the obelisk.
The biggest stones measure 32 inches high by 90 inches long and weigh
up to five tons.
Unlike the King’s Chapel blocks, the Quincy Granite stones are smooth and matching in color, gray with a
few dark streaks.
Outside of lightning rods that run up two corners of the obelisk, no other ornamentation mars the simple
structure.

To access the monument, you go into the visitor center, exit by a side door, and enter the obelisk.
Spiraling up around the
central column are 294 steps.
In winter, water dripping from granite can create long icicles, whereas in summer, the monument
is pleasantly cool.
A handful of narrow windows—which occasionally contain birds’ nests—bring in both light and air.
An open
room made by the pyramid at the top has four small square windows that provide an unparalleled view of Boston and the surrounding
area.

Even before completion of the monument, its construction, as well as the development of the Granite Railway, led to granite
finally becoming the preeminent building stone in Boston.
Willard showed that large blocks could be used and transported,
and by refining quarry techniques, he helped drive the price down by 75 percent.

Willard’s work became “the standard for public building in Boston— monumental, severe, and permanent,” wrote art historian
Jane Holtz Kay in
Lost Boston
.
³²
Designated the Boston granite style, the buildings were often massive, such as the 535-foot-long Quincy Market or Boston
Custom House with its forty-two-ton columns that took fifty-five oxen and twelve horses to pull.
Many of these early structures
still bear the perforation marks of Tarbox’s plug and feather technique.

As Boston grew in prominence, its leading architectural style spread.
Customhouses in Savannah,Georgia; San Francisco; and
Portland,Maine, used Quincy Granite.
In 1836 Willard provided stone for the New York Merchants Exchange, designed by another
former student, Isaiah Rogers.
Quincy quarrymen also shipped millions of paving stones to New York (still visible in a few
streets in Greenwich Village, SoHo, and TriBeCa), Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
(Vic Campbell said that one of the major
paving stone suppliers didn’t actually quarry the stones, they simply collected waste from a quarry on the hill above their
shop and cut it into paving blocks.) The hole in the Granite Railway Quarry began to grow.

Other granite areas beside Quincy also prospered.
Rockport quarries provided a dark gray rock, transported by sea.
The pink
Milford Granite ended up in the Boston Public Library and New York’s Penn Station, and granite from Chelmsford was floated
down the Middlesex Canal to the state prison, where it was cut.
Rocks were shipped around the country and to Cuba.

Each of the New England states began to excavate, cut, and ship granite as well.
By 1889, Maine had 153 granite quarries,
including one in Vinalhaven that employed fifteen hundred people.
Quarries in New Hampshire (now nicknamed the Granite State),
Rhode Island,Connecticut, and Vermont (home of Barre, the self-proclaimed “Granite Center of the World”) generated everything
from paving stones to a single block three hundred feet long, twenty feet wide, and six to ten feet thick.

They all shared one characteristic—access to transportation.
In Maine the quarries were situated on the coast.
Vermont’s were
near railroads, as were Connecticut’s, which also had quarries on rivers and the coast.
In areas where transportation was
a problem, builders used the stone locally and moved rock via carts over dirt or cobblestone roads.

Granite continued to dominate as a building stone for many years, aided by its physical attributes.
Because of the abundant
feldspar and quartz, granite is twice as hard as limestone or marble, up to twice as hard as slate, and at least equal to
and generally harder than sandstone, which is usually also made of feldspar and quartz grains.
Because of the interlocked
minerals, granite is significantly less porous than sandstone and limestone, and about equal in porosity to marble and slate.
In the age before steel beams, when stone had to provide the only means of support, granite’s compressive strength made it
essential for monumental structures.

In the past two decades granite has again become popular, for many of the same reasons, although compressibility is less important
with steel infrastructures.
Homeowners desire it because of its hardness.
(Slicing and dicing with a good sharp Henckels knife
will scratch a marble countertop.) Now, however, granite from the United States has lost ground to that of Finland, China,
Norway, Sardinia, and South Africa.
Baltic Brown, Big White Flower, Blue Pearl, Rosa Beta, and Zimbabwe Black are some granites
that now dominate the market.

The Quincy Granite’s massive nature, as well as its dark color and ability to take a polish, helped make it a popular building
stone until about the Civil War.
As railroads spread, however, less expensive granite started to flood the market and undercut
Quincy’s competitiveness.
Devastating fires in Chicago and Boston further weakened demand by revealing that heat flaked and
cracked granite.
A second wave of demand for Quincy did rise in the 1880s and 1890s but not as a building stone.
Instead,
people wanted the dark granite for Civil War monuments and later for gravestones.

The beginning of the end of the Quincy quarries began in World War I when people stripped them of iron and steel and scrapped
the machinery to melt down for shipbuilding.
Demand continued to drop and finally plummeted during the Great Depression.
World
War II sealed the industry’s fate, and in 1942 the Granite Railway Company folded.
The final large quarry, Swingle’s, limped
along until 1963.

With the industry shut down, the Granite Railway Quarry and other nearby quarries filled with water.
They became notorious
as unwatched places for dumping cars, trash, and the occasional dead mobster.
At least thirteen people died swimming, diving,
and climbing in them.
In the late 1990s, the police officially declared the Granite Railway Quarry a crime scene while divers
searched for a young woman who they suspected had been murdered and dumped in the deep water.
Instead, they located an Irish
teenager, who had been missing for three years.
Divers thought they saw another body but never found it despite draining the
quarry.
With the quarries finally dry, the land owners, the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC), decided to fill the hole
and prevent water from seeping back in.

Coincidentally, workers in Boston were digging an even larger hole and needed to dispose of their dirt.
The MDC gladly accepted
five hundred thousand cubic yards of clay and lightly contaminated soil from the Big Dig, as well as seven hundred thousand
dollars in tipping fees.
An additional 12 million tons of Big Dig dirt were used to fill in other quarries around Quincy and
to make a twenty-seven-hole golf course, four Little League fields, two soccer fields, and luxury homes, complete with granite
countertops.
By 2002 the Granite Railway Quarry was safe, grass was growing, and 174 years of history were buried.

3

POETRY IN STONE—
CARMEL GRANITE

Here on the rock it is great and beautiful, here on the foam-wet

granite sea fang it is easy to praise

Life and water and the shining stones.

—Robinson Jeffers, “Meditation on Saviors”

A
CENTURY LATER, at the opposite end of the continent from Bunker Hill Monument, another transformation occurred because of
granite.
This time,however, the stone affected just one man—the poet Robinson Jeffers.
The granite so infused his life that
it helped transform him from an insecure, mediocre writer to one of the great American poets of the twentieth century.

Jeffers used granite to build his private residence and a forty-foot-high tower.
He called the structures Tor House and Hawk
Tower and referred to the granite as “sea-orphaned stone.”
¹
The rock came from the beach below his house, which stands on a low hill that rises from the Pacific Ocean in Carmel,California.
Jeffers placed each granite boulder by hand, generally in the afternoon after he had spent the morning working on his poetry.

In describing the changes in him, Jeffers’s wife, Una, wrote, “As he helped the masons shift and place the wind- and wave-worn
granite I think he realized some kinship with it and became aware of strengths in himself unknown before.
Thus at the age
of thirty-one there came to him a kind of awakening such as adolescents and religious converts are said to experience.”
²

I first saw Tor House and Hawk Tower in 2002 from the road that runs along the water below them.
Light green grasses, gray
green shrubs and a few light gray boulders covered the slope leading from the road up to the stone buildings, behind which
stood a row of wind-shaped Monterey cypresses.
The house was squat with a narrow line of windows just below a small triangle
of brown roof.
The tower was square, about half the width of the house, and topped by a square turret with two eyelike windows
opening out to the ocean.
The structures didn’t appear to have been built so much as to have emerged geologically from the
hillside, as if Jeffers had used the nearby cliffs, seastacks, and outcroppings for blueprints.

Hawk Tower, built in 1920–1925 by Robinson Jeffers, Carmel, California.

Up close, the buildings sustained my first impressions of geology manifest as home.
No two stones were alike and rarely did
stones of the same size rest next to each other.
Edges were not perfectly straight but looked weathered and eroded.
Barnacles
still covered some of the stones Jeffers liberated from the sea.
Finger trails ran through the mortar, trace fossils of a
man and his passion.

Jeffers mixed small, large, and immense boulders in a planned but not consistent pattern.
He anchored a corner of the guest
room at Tor House on a mass of bedrock, which he called Thuban in honor of the ancient polar star.
He spanned one window with
a single boulder, another with several square rocks, and over the main entrance to Hawk Tower he placed a perfectly shaped
wedge as a keystone.

Whole Earth Catalog
editor Stewart Brand wrote that Tor House “expressed more direct intelligence per square inch than any other house in America.”
³
Jeffers expressed his connection to his house more poetically: “My fingers had the art to make stone love stone.”
⁴
I know of no other person or building that better expresses the direct relationship between people and stone.

I returned to Tor House in April 2006 to meet Aaron Yoshinobu, a geology professor at Texas Tech University.
For many years,
he has been probing various Jeffers archive manuscripts and photographs, as well as “mapping” the stonemasonry and geology
of Tor House and Hawk Tower.
“One thing I like about Jeffers’s work is that he talks about the importance of poets and artists
creating things of permanence, of lasting value.
You see that in the house and tower,” said Yoshinobu.
⁵
“As a geologist, I relate to the intense connection and passion Jeffers found in rocks and mountains.”

Jeffers wrote of rocks as the “bones of the old mother,”
⁶
the “world’s cradle,”
⁷
and “old comrades.”
⁸
Waves were “drunken quarrymen/ Climbing the cliff, hewing out more stone for me.”
⁹
The surf “cheerfully pounds the worn granite drum.”
¹⁰
During erosion the “hills dissolve and are liquidated.”
¹¹

And it is clear Jeffers felt the tremor of at least one earthquake.
He wrote:

.
.
.
the teeth of the fracture

Gnashed together, snapping on each other; the powers

of the earth drank

Their pang of unendurable release and the old resistances
Locked.
The long coast was shaken like a leaf.
¹²

In a second, haunting description:

The heads of the high redwoods down the deep canyon

Rippled, instantly earthquake shook the granite-boned

ridge like a rat

In a dog’s teeth; the house danced and bobbled,

lightning flashed from the ground, the deep earth roared,

yellow dust

Was seen rising in divers places and rock-slides

Roared in the gorges; then all things stilled and the

earth stood quiet.
¹³

Yoshinobu’s mother read Jeffers’s work to him when he was a child, but it wasn’t until he went to college and she gave him
The Selected Poetry
of Robinson Jeffers
that he realized how much he liked Jeffers’s language.
Around the same time, when Yoshinobu was hopping between majors—first
English, then astronomy—his mother also suggested he study geology.
He thought it sounded boring but his girlfriend was taking
a geology class and they went on a field trip together.
He enjoyed it far more than she did, ended up majoring in geology,
and went on to get a masters degree and doctorate, which he received from the University of Southern California in 1999.

His mother gave him another book of Jeffers poetry,
Cawdor and
Other Poems
, during his work on his dissertation.
The title poem, an epic narrative, centers on a family living at a ranch near Point
Sur, thirty miles south of Yoshinobu’s hometown of Pacific Grove.
He read it every night in his tent in the Klamath Mountains.
“There’s something about growing up here and Jeffers’s ability to grab the essence of this region.
He made it universal,”
he said.
“Taking Aeschylus and Euripides and recasting them in a new way on the Big Sur coast in a totally different rhythm.
It was like nothing I had read before.
It floored me.”

Jeffers’s passion, knowledge, and understanding of rocks and place centers on Tor House and Hawk Tower.
“At the same time
he’s building these structures, he’s working on his most evocative poems, that are not poems for this age but poems for ages
on end,” said Yoshinobu.

John Robinson Jeffers was born January 10, 1887, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, to Annie Tuttle Jeffers, twenty-six years old
and described as charming, outgoing, and musical.
She was more than twenty years younger than his father, William Hamilton
Jeffers, an intense and private man known to neighbors as “old Ichabod Crane.”
¹⁴
A scholar of Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Babylonian, Hebrew, and Arabic, he taught biblical and ecclesiastical history at Western
Theological Seminary, in Pittsburgh.

“When I was nine years old my father began to slap Latin into me, literally, with his hands,” wrote Robinson, many years later.
¹⁵
To keep young Robin, as the family called him, better focused on his studies, Dr.
Jeffers first planted a large hedge around
their home, then moved to the country.
The family also traveled extensively in Europe and lived abroad for many years.
Robinson
attended schools in Switzerland and Germany, often switching yearly.
By age twelve, he could converse in Latin, read Greek,
and spoke German and French fluently.
¹⁶

His father’s gift of two small books during the family’s final year in Europe may have had as significant an impact as slapping
and schooling.
Robinson quickly abandoned one volume, the poems of Thomas Campbell, but he fell in love with the other, the
poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
The florid verses intoxicated the impressionable fourteen-year-old, kindling a passion in
Jeffers that led to subsequent encounters with Swinburne, Shelley, and Tennyson.
He later wrote, “If I should ever wonder
about the uses of poetry, I have only to remember that year’s experience.”
¹⁷

The Jeffers family, which also included Robinson’s younger brother, Hamilton, returned to Pittsburgh in 1902.
His father placed
Robinson in the University of Pittsburgh for one year before Dr.
Jeffers’s poor health forced them to move to Pasadena,California.
Continuing his tradition of switching schools annually, Robinson now began again, this time as a sixteen-year-old junior at
Occidental College.
He attended classes in Greek, biblical literature, rhetoric, and astronomy.
He wrote poetry for student
magazines and in 1904 sold his first poem—“The Condor”—for twelve dollars.
¹⁸

At Occidental, Robinson took two additional classes that had long-lasting effects on him, according to Yoshinobu.
The first
was a surveying class, which probably helped Jeffers when he began work on his stone structures in Carmel.
He also studied
geology using a standard text of the day, Joseph Le Conte’s
Elements of Geology
.
Le Conte, who was a pioneer member of the Sierra Club and an early proponent of evolution, compared the study of Earth with
the study of the human body.
Structural geology, defined as rocks and minerals and how they are arranged, was analogous to
anatomy.
The planet’s physiology consisted of erosion and weathering, produced by water, wind, ice, plants, and animals.
Historical
geology, like human embryology, examined physical and biological changes over time.
And like the human body, each facet of
geology influenced the others.

“That’s totally Jeffers.
Le Conte has to be an early influence on Jeffers's notion of living, breathing rocks, the idea that
everything around is part of one living entity,” said Yoshinobu.
“He can’t wait to die to dissolve into calcium, which will
form in the soil, which is part of the DNA of the first thing to crawl out of the ocean onto land.
Oddly, Jeffers got his
worst grade, an eighty-five, in geology.”

Jeffers graduated in 1905 and that fall started at the University of Southern California.
He planned on studying for a master’s
degree in letters, taking classes in oratory, Spanish, and advanced German.
The latter course changed his life, for there
he met the outgoing, intelligent, and beautiful wife of Edward “Teddie” Kuster, a prominent young lawyer.
Una Call Kuster,
two years older and three years married, had entered USC to escape the “incessant whirl of activity”
¹⁹
of her social life.

A hesitant romance began between the two but when Jeffers left again for Europe with his parents in 1906, he sent infrequent
postcards.
Upon his return, after taking a job translating German medical papers for his mother’s physician, Jeffers entered
medical school at USC.
He also found time to swim and walk the beach with Una.
By 1910 they knew they were in love but also
knew they couldn’t marry.
Thinking that absence might help the heart grow colder, Jeffers moved to Seattle, with his parents
and Hamilton, to attend the University of Washington School of Forestry.
By late spring, Una and Robinson’s romance appeared
over.