Stories in Stone (44 page)

10.
The red Indian River slate formed 464 million years ago.
The purple and green slates come from a rock unit known as the
Middle Granville and formed 530 million years ago.
Vermont produces a black slate that was deposited 540 million years ago.
Principal metamorphosis occurred 450 million years ago during the Taconic orogeny.

11.
Two black slates come from Pennsylvania, the 445-million-year-old Martins-burg and the 455-million-year-old Peach Bottom
Slate.
Virginia’s slate formed 450 million years ago and Maine’s 30 million years later, with metamorphosis occurring about
370 million years ago during the Acadian orogeny.

12.
In 1931 the British Standards Institution sought to establish a uniform system for roofing shingles.
Abandoned were terms
such as “lady,” “countess,” and “duchess.” They had arisen in the 1700s replacing the Catch-22-esque “single,” “double,” “double
doubles,” and “double double doubles,” as well as the equally poetic “farewell,” “mope,” “haghattee,” and “Jenny-why-gettest-thou.”

13.
Ben Kantner, interview with author, Snohomish,Washington, January 2008.

14.
Many people choose copper over stainless steel because they like the look, especially when using copper gutters.
Like
stainless steel, copper doesn’t rust.
It also inhibits moss growth.

15.
When it became known that John Quincy Adams purchased a billiard table and placed it in the White House in 1825, representative
Samuel Carson of North Carolina condemned the president for a sin that “would shock and alarm the religious, the moral, and
reflecting part of the community.”

16.
Gravestone researchers refer to documentation of slate coming from Slate Island as early as 1630.
In addition, twenty
tons of slate were quarried near Brain-tree and on Hangman’s Island in 1721.
These dates raise a question about the claim
that the Peach Bottom quarry is the first in America.
Which was first probably depends on how one defines quarry.

17.
Walter Isaacson,
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
(New York: Simon &Schuster, 2003), 470.

18.
Written on July 26, 1838, by Enoch Cobb Wines and published in
A Trip to
Boston in a Series of Letters to the Editor of the United States Gazette
(Boston: Little and Brown, 1838), 45.

19.
Blanche Linden-Ward,
Silent City on a Hill: Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s
Mount Auburn Cemetery
(Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1989), 218.

20.
Mount Auburn Cemetery lifted its slate ban in the 1870s during a period of colonial revival resulting from the country’s
centennial celebrations.
Other cemeteries also returned to using slate.
The new slate grave markers preserved the shape of
the old, but not the symbols of the Puritans.
Floral decorations replaced death’s-heads.
Most of the slate came from eastern
Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as well as Maine and Pennsylvania.
Some carvers also imported slate from Wales.

10: “
AUTUMN
20,000
YEARS AGO
”

1.
Chris Romanek, phone interview with author, April 2007.

2.
Translations of Vitruvius are based on Ingrid D.
Rowland, trans.,
Vitruvius: Ten
Books on Architecture
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999) or from the various papers of Marie Jackson.

3.
I could not have written this section on travertine, Vitruvius, and Roman building techniques without the support of Dr.
Jackson.
She graciously answered numerous questions and read the text and corrected my interpretations.
Key works include:
M.
D.
Jackson, F.
Marra, R.
L.
Hay,C.
Cawood, and E.
M.Winkler, “The Judicious Selection and Preservation of Tuff and Travertine,”
Building Stone in Ancient Rome, Archaeometry
47, no.
3 (2005): 485–510; Marie Jackson and Fabrizio Marra, “Roman Stone Masonry: Volcanic Foundations of the Ancient City,”
American Journal of Archaeology
110 (2006): 403–436; Marie Jackson, Cynthia Kosso, Fabrizio Marra, and Richard Hay, “Geological Basis of Vitruvius’ Empirical
Observations of Material Characteristics of Rock Utilized in Roman Masonry,”
Proceedings of the Second International
Congress of Construction History
2 (2006): 1685–1702.

4.
Janet DeLaine,“The Supply of Building Materials to the City of Rome,” in
Settlement
and Economy in Italy 1500
b.c.
to
a.d.
1500
, ed.
N.
Christie.
Papers of the Fifth Conference in Italian Archaeology,
Oxbow Monograph
41 (1995): 554–62.

5.
Information on cutting and use of dowels is from Lynne Lancaster, “The Process of Building the Colosseum,”
Journal of Roman Archaeology
18 (2005): 57–83.

6.
Robert Folk, phone interviews with author, March 2007.

7.
Henry S.
Chafetz and Robert L.
Folk, “Travertines: Depositional Morphology and the Bacterially Constructed Constituents,”
Journal of Sedimentary
Petrology
54 (1984), 289–316.

8.
In a notorious case in the mid-1990s, which mimics what happened in Chicago to Big Stan, a high-rise office building in
Boston had to have every travertine panel reanchored because of frost-induced cracking.
Some panels required extra bolts because
of numerous cracks and other panels had to be replaced because of excess damage.

9.
Dante mentions the Bulicame in Canto XIV of the
Inferno
.
He wrote of a brook visited by prostitutes, and more appropriately, “Its bed and both its banks were made of stone, together
with the slopes along its shores.” That stone, of course, was travertine.

10.
Paula Noble, phone interview with author, August 2007.

11.
Robert L.
Folk, “SEM Imaging of Bacteria and Nannobacteria in Carbonate Sediments and Rocks,”
Journal of Sedimentary Petrology
63 (1993), 990–99.

12.
Brenda Miller, phone interview with author, May 2007.

13.
Many publications state that the Getty travertine came from the same quarry as the Colosseum travertine.
This is not technically
correct.
After two thousand years, no original quarries remain from the time of the Romans.
Both the Colosseum and Getty stone
came from the historic Barco region.

14.
Richard Meier,
Building the Getty
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 186.

15.
Meier quote is from a brochure produced by the Getty Museum titled
Architecture
of the Getty
.

16.
Michael Palladino, interview with author, Los Angeles, March 14, 2007.

17.
Quote comes from Meier’s acceptance speech for the Pritzker Prize, which he won in 1984.

18.
Meier,
Building the Getty
, 57.

19.
The first big Italian travertine project was New York’s Pennsylvania Station in 1910.
Penn Station led to a minor boom
in travertine imports but mostly in smaller projects, ironically including the interior of the county courthouse in Bedford,
Indiana, built in 1930.

20.
Fabrizio Mariotti, interview with author,Tivoli, Italy, October 18, 2007.

21.
Mariotti is correct that deposition occurred twenty thousand years ago, but the primary period of deposition appears to
be older.
Geologists have not focused on dating specific layers of travertine.
Generally, deeper layers are older, though
there is not a direct correlation between age and depth.

22.
Meier,
Building the Getty
, 104.

A Note on the Author

David B.
Williams writes about the natural world from his home in Seattle.
He has been a national park ranger in Moab,Utah,
and Boston, writes curriculum for the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, and teaches geology programs for the North
Cascades Institute.
Past books include
The Seattle Street-Smart Naturalist
and
A Naturalist’s
Guide to Canyon Country
.
He has written for
Smithsonian
,
High Country
News
, and
Science World
, and frequently contributes to
Earth
magazine and the
Seattle Times
.
An avid reader, hiker, and biker, he lives with his wife, Marjorie Kittle.