Stories in Stone (6 page)

Granite also crept up in friends’ houses.
Granite countertops have become one of the hottest features in real estate.
If you
look at ads for any condo or town house or new subdivision, most listings trumpet the stone.
The popularity of these must-have
kitchen accoutrements has helped make granite perhaps the best-known type of stone to nongeologists.
(Not forgetting, of course,
how every four years granite bursts on the scene in the form of Olympic curling stones.)

Throughout the country, granite is widespread and common.
It tops the lower forty-eight’s highest spot, Mt.
Whitney, and floors
the deepest gorge, Hells Canyon on the Snake River.
Granite is a type of igneous rock that began as a liquid, or magma, and
solidified within the planet.
Granites appeared at the surface only when tectonic forces shoved them up or erosion stripped
away the overlying rocks.
The word “granite,” comes from the Italian
granito
, or grained, in reference to the interlocked grains of minerals that make up the stone.

In a hand specimen and particularly in the wall of a building where they have been polished, granites resemble no other building
stone.
Minerals range in size from a peppercorn to a plum.
Some minerals have a glassy appearance.
Others twinkle.
Most are
dull.
Granite can be pink or red, infrequently green to black, and commonly white to gray.
Rarely will you find any layering,
consistent orientation of the grains, or swirls.
You will never find fossils.

The Quincy Granite fits this general description, albeit with idiosyncrasies.
Most granites contain two types of the mineral
feldspar, broadly called plagioclase feldspar and alkali feldspar.
In contrast, Quincy contains only alkali feldspar, a result
of solidifying at a high temperature.
Alkali feldspar gives the rock its characteristic green-tinted, dusky gray color.
(One
Quincy quarry owner called himself the “Extra Dark Man” because of the particularly dark stone excavated from his property.)
Further darkening results from Quincy’s nearly black quartz, as opposed to the more common clear or white varieties.
⁷
High temperature also sapped the Quincy Granite’s magma of another typical granite mineral, mica, and led to the formation
of an unusual mineral known as riebeckite.
Because riebeckite is harder than mica, it allows the Quincy Granite to take a
high polish.
Riebeckite also contains a very stable form of iron, which means that Quincy Granite doesn’t rust and stain when
it weathers.

Dark and hard, polishable, and weather-resistant, and with Tarbox’s plug and feather cutting technology in place, the Quincy
Granite was an ideal stone for the incipient building trade.
All it needed was a signature building.

Little was done with granite for the twenty years after Tarbox ventured south to Quincy.
Workers completed Bulfinch’s State
Prison in 1805, although not with Quincy Granite.
Instead, Bulfinch used Chelmsford granite, which could be floated twenty-six
miles down the recently completed Middlesex Canal.
Granite also went into the Boston courthouse, University Hall at Harvard,
several Boston churches, and Massachusetts General Hospital, but these, and a few others, were the only notable granite buildings
to appear by 1825.
⁸
Although made from granite, all were built in a traditional style using conventionally sized blocks.

This interlude between 1803 and 1825 was granite’s incubation period.
Architects were experimenting with how to design with
granite, and transportation was a problem.
In Quincy, stonemasons were learning better how to take advantage of the plug and
feather technique and still primarily working with rocks they found on the ground.
What would become the Granite Railway Quarry
was still a forested knob known as Pine Hill when incubation ended.

In 1825 an architect-engineer named Solomon Willard arrived in Quincy.
Legend has it that he had walked three hundred miles
across New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts in search of the perfect granite for what would become his most famous building,
the Bunker Hill Monument.
Willard found that granite at a ledge in a wooded area about a mile from the King’s Chapel “quarry”
site.
⁹

Born June 2, 1783, in Petersham, Massachusetts, Willard spent his youth on the family farm and in his father’s carpentry shop.
He moved to Boston when he turned twenty-one “to seek, not his fortune (as is the object of so many), but his own intellectual
improvement, and the means and opportunity of doing greater good,” according to the official history of the Bunker Hill Monument.
¹⁰

When not helping his fellow man, Willard studied architecture and drawing.
He relied on carpentry to make a living.
Willard
carved columns for the steeple at Park Street Church, an eagle for the pediment at the old Custom House, and a model of the
U.S.
Capitol for Charles Bulfinch.
He began carving stone and in 1819 cut the Ionic columns for St.
Paul’s Church, which launched
the fad for Greek Revival structures in Boston.
These columns were made from Aquia Creek sandstone, a notoriously crumbly
rock quarried in Virginia and used in the U.S.
Capitol and the White House.
Willard also began to design buildings and to
teach drawing and architecture.
By the early 1820s, he was well known and well regarded in Boston.

His involvement with Bunker Hill began in August 1824, when directors of the Bunker Hill Monument Association (BHMA) asked
Willard to submit a plan for a monumental column.
Boston Brahmins, such as Daniel Webster and Thomas Handasyd Perkins, had
formed the association in 1823 to build “a simple, majestic, lofty, and permanent monument, which shall carry down to remote
ages a testimony .
.
.
to the heroic virtue and courage of those men who began and achieved the independence of their country.”
¹¹

By 1825 the BHMA had raised money and decided what type of monument would best honor one of the most important battles of
the Revolution, which the American forces lost and that didn’t occur on Bunker Hill.
They also purchased property—eventually
totaling fifteen acres—on Breed’s Hill, where the battle did take place.
Apparently not pleased with Willard’s potential design,
the directors also published a notice in Boston papers and around the country announcing a design competition, with the winner
receiving a hundred dollars.
In response, Willard told Boston’s best and brightest he “had no wish to enter into any contest
about the designs.”
¹²
(I suspect that in private his words were a bit saltier.)

Fifty designs were submitted, including an obelisk from Robert Mills, who designed the Washington Monument in 1836.
A former
student of Willard’s, Horatio Greenough, won the competition in April with his own obelisk.
In his memoir Greenough wrote,“The
obelisk .
.
.
says but one word, but it speaks loud.
If I understand its voice, it says, Here!
It says no more.”
¹³

Despite Greenough’s plan, the directors dithered on whether an obelisk or a column was more appropriate for the monument.
Part of the problem was style and part was cost, so the BHMA appealed to Willard to make a cost estimate for an obelisk and
for a column.
After learning that a column would cost $75,000 and an obelisk $60,000, the directors finally reduced their
decision to one all could agree upon and chose the obelisk.
Keeping to their rapid-fire decision-making, they appointed a
committee of five to prepare a design.

It was most likely during his cost preparation work that Willard found his ledge in Quincy.
Two days after the directors’
meeting, a young engineer and friend of Willard's, Gridley Bryant, who had helped Willard on the cost estimates, bought the
four-acre property in Quincy for $250.
¹⁴

Ten days after approving the obelisk, and for no apparent reason not willing to use Greenough’s plan, association directors
laid a cornerstone commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Thousands watched on June 17, 1825,
as the great French general the Marquis de Lafayette led the ceremonies.
Workers buried a box within the cornerstone that
contained official accounts of the battle, coins and medals, and a piece of Plymouth Rock, a 620-million-year-old granite
from Dedham.
¹⁵

The design committee presented their plan on July 5.
Taller and simpler than Greenough’s obelisk, the new proposal included
details on the foundation, the interior lighting and steps, size of stones, obelisk dimension, and cost.
Construction and
design now totaled $100,000.
The committee also recommended hiring an architect and superintendent.

Continuing to move at their normal speedy pace, the directors named Solomon Willard as architect and superintendent on October
31,1825.
He offered to do the job for free but ultimately accepted the $500 per year the committee insisted he be paid.
He
also gave $1,000 to the BHMA.
His first proposal as superintendent was to purchase the ledge of granite from Gridley Bryant,
which the association did for $325, a nice profit for Bryant.
During the winter Willard finalized the drawings for the obelisk,
increasing the size of the building blocks from eighteen inches to thirty-two inches tall.

Transportation presented the central snag for Willard.
How would he move blocks that weighed up to six tons across the twelve
miles of swamp, forest, and farms that separated Quincy from Charlestown?
Willard favored either a completely overland route
or moving the stone in winter, when sledges could carry the blocks to the Neponset River, four miles north.
A barge would
transport the stone through Boston Harbor to Charlestown, which formed a peninsula on the north side of the Charles River,
due north of downtown Boston.
Gridley Bryant had another idea.
Six years younger than Willard, Bryant was born in Scituate,
Massachusetts.
In recalling his childhood, Bryant wrote that he had a “mechanical and inventive turn of mind .
.
.
I was generally
at the head of the young urchins of our neighborhood, and when there was a fort to be constructed .
.
.
I was always appointed
the chief engineer.” Despite his friends’ high regard, his mother pushed him out of the house at fifteen to apprentice with
a leading Boston builder.
Six years later he headed out on his own and by the early 1820s, Bryant was one of the foremost
masons in Boston, including a stint working for Willard.
¹⁶

In late 1825 Bryant suggested a railway as the best means to transport granite from the quarry to the Neponset River.
He came
up with the idea after hearing about English railroads transporting stone from quarries.
The BHMA rejected his plan as too
ambitious.
Not to be thwarted, Bryant presented his idea to several businessmen, including Thomas Handasyd Perkins, who although
a member of the association, was open to Bryant’s proposition.
¹⁷

Perkins, a Boston merchant and philanthropist who had made a fortune in the China trade, not the least of which was from opium,
endorsed the project.
He knew about railroads from trips to England and recognized their moneymaking potential.
With Perkins’s
prompting, a group made a petition to the state legislature on January 5, 1826, to establish a railroad.
The bill passed on
March 4 chartering the Granite Railway Company with Perkins as president.
(In a letter, Perkins wrote “I think I may safely
call it my road, not only because I set it agoing, but because I own 3/5ths of it.”)
¹⁸
The Perkins group hired Bryant as superintendent and designer.
On April 1, 1826, he broke ground on what was called, and
is often still called, the first railroad in the United States.

“If you use enough adjectives, you can get it right,” said Vic Campbell, who has spent the past forty years researching the
history of the Granite Railway, locating its route, and telling people about it.
¹⁹
“The Granite Railway was the first chartered, commercial railway in the United States.” He noted that Fred Gamst, a former
anthropology professor at the University of Massachusetts, determined that the Granite Railway was actually the twelfth American
railway.
The first was in Boston, ran about one-quarter mile, and carried dirt off Beacon Hill to fill the Back Bay.
Built
in 1805, the Beacon Hill Railroad would have been running when a displaced Scituate teenager arrived in town.
Gamst speculated
that such an unusual operation would have attracted the attention of a young Gridley Bryant despite his later claim that “all
the cars, trucks, and machinery are my original invention.”
²⁰