Stories in Stone - Reviews

Now that Stories in Stone is out in the world, the nerve-wracking time begins. What will others write about the book? So far, I have been very pleased with the reviews. Today, there was a nice one in the Providence Journal. I particularly like the reviewer's opening, "Naturalist David Williams was in heaven, living among the fantastic red sandstone formations of southern Utah. When he accompanied his graduate-student wife to live in Boston, he thought he had descended into hell." Moving to Boston wasn't that bad but it was a bit trying, till I found the stones of the city.

I also have to thank Tony Edger of the blog Fossils and Other Living Things for his wonderful review and description of Stories in Stone. Like him, I am clearly a fan of Robinson Jeffers. Also, it is quite pleasing to have a fellow geoblogger say such kind things.

And yesterday, I also did a reading/walk at one of Seattle's great bookstores, Elliott Bay Books. I started with a 30-minute talk and then took a group of about 35 out to look at some local building stone, as well as some more exotic rock. Walks such as this one are very satisfying for me, as I get to introduce people to the wonders of geology and its connection to each of us. It really shows me that people are interested in rocks and stories they tell.

Pop Rocks, Phillips Petroleum, and Petrified Wood - Chapter 7

Typical modern gas station architecture centers on a simple design principal—uniformity. A Shell station in Seattle looks like one in Savannah. Switch a Texaco station from Tuscaloosa with one from Tallahassee and no one would know the difference. But gas stations used to be unique, none more so than a small, one bay building in Lamar, Colorado a small town in southeastern Colorado. Built in the 1930s by William “Bill” Brown, the station was made entirely of petrified wood that Brown stole from private land.

Brown obtained his unusual building material from wooded hills 20 miles south of Lamar. (Curiously, one person who helped build the station was Bill Mitchell, who later achieved fame for inventing the infamous candy, Pop Rocks.) First described in 1895, some of the petrified logs are up to 30 feet long. Surprisingly, few modern geologists have studied the petrified wood mostly because Brown was not alone in pilfering the fossils. Many people simply drove out ranch roads and loaded their trucks with what they found. A geologist who has worked in the area reports that there isn’t enough “petrified wood of that quality to build a bird house, much less a gas station.”

Brown’s petrified wood began life 125 million years ago on a relatively flat, semi-arid landscape that tilted down to a coastal plain to the east. North America was located a bit south of its present location but a sea had begun to move in from the north, which by 85 million years ago had split the continent into two massive islands. Large streams flowed out of nearby hills, crisscrossed flood plains, and removed most plants and animals that could have fossilized except for trees, some of which are now found in the gas station.

Photo courtesy of Dorothy Smith • Circa 1936

Only three month’s after the Brown’s station opened, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! mentioned it in a column. The caption read “The Petrified Wood House, Built Entirely of Wood Turned to Stone.” Brown had a sign made with this caption and placed it on the front of the station.

Brown’s gas station also interested Frank Phillips, the founder of Phillips Petroleum, the type of gas that Brown sold. Phillips tried to buy the gas station, which he hoped to ship to his Oklahoma estate. When Brown found out that it was Phillips who wanted to buy the building, he immediately jacked up the price. Phillips, who was known to be a cheapskate, refused to buy it. Instead, his agents surreptitiously bought 48,025 pounds of petrified wood at $1/ton and shipped the petrified wood to Oklahoma, but Phillips never built a copy of Brown’s filling station.

Photo courtesy of Carolyn Peyton • Undated

Six months after his purchase, however, Phillips did become owner of a new petrified wood building. On December 2, 1939, when Phillips turned 66 at a huge bash in Oklahoma, three Lamar residents associated with Brown’s station gave Phillips a model of the station. After Phillips’ birthday, the little gas station was placed on display at his estate and was thrown out sometime in the 1950s, although no one knows exactly when.

Red Mathews and the model station he and others made for Frank Phillips- 1939

Brown owned the station until he died in Lamar on November 2, 1957. The little building has not been a gas station for several decades but the weathered sign is still above the single bay door and the present owner says that people still stop by to take a photo of “The World’s Oldest Building.”

Starbucks and Slate

Coffee and slate: two great things that go together. Yesterday, the Seattle Times reported that Starbucks is putting a new look into some of its stores. Primarily, the corporation is planning to use more recycled and reused building materials. What struck me most about the article is that the new menu boards at the remodeled stores in Seattle use chalkboards from Garfield High School. Those chalkboards, which I (along with previous Garfield attendees Quincy Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Bruce Lee) may have used when I attended Garfield in the 1980s, are made of slate.

Starbucks' remodeled store in Seattle (from the Seattle Times)

Blackboard slate came primarily from Lehigh and Northampton counties in Pennsylvania. The metamorphosed stone began as a sediment deposited in an ocean, when rivers carried clay, silt, and sand off North America and out into a deep marine basin. The 450-million-year old sediments first formed into shale, followed tens of millions of year later by metamorphosis to slate, under thousands of feet of rock. At present, up to 7,000 feet of slate beds make up the valleys and ridges around Pen Argyl, 60 miles north of Philadelphia.

Pennsylvania slate (from Penn Big Bed Slate Co. Inc. web site)

Smooth, durable, and uniform, slate took chalk easily and legibly, didn’t absorb water, and stayed straight and true. By 1905, the majority of blackboard makers in the United States sold boards of slate. Six years later, the Cyclopedia of Education reported on blackboards that “It is doubtless no exaggeration to say that [slate]…should be used for all brick, stone, or concrete buildings.”

Blackboards are a wonderful teaching tool. They don’t break or warp. They can be cleaned indefinitely, either with an eraser or with your hand. They produce a pleasing click-clack sound when written on properly. Often taking up an entire side of a room, they provide a huge space for jotting down anything from music to drawings to numbers. They also seem eternal and permanent. Just think of the photographs of Einstein, or any number of mathematicians and physicists, writing out elaborate equations on a blackboard and you will recognize the role they have played in education and communication.

Or consider how our use of blackboards has seeded our language. We wipe the slate clean or start over with a clean slate. We chalk up something to experience. We refer to a tabula rasa, literally a scraped tablet, but more often defined as a clean slate. We vote for one of a slate of candidates. We are slated to do something and those who had a debt were formerly said to be on the slate. No other stone has contributed a comparable literary etymology.

I am happy to see the reuse of the slate from Garfield by Starbucks. I am lucky to have my own slab of that slate as well. The only downside is that Garfield now has those ugly, petroleum based whiteboards instead of the wonderful blackboards of my youth. Perhaps the school district can be inspired by Starbucks and reuse slate. It is certainly more environmentally hip than whiteboard.

America's Building Stone - Chapter 6

Go to any city across the country and you will find one building stone in all of them: Salem Limestone from Indiana. People pray, have babies, get drivers licenses, and file for divorce in structures made from this 330-million-year old buff rock. Salem was also the first stone that many people encountered when they entered the United States; the administration building at Ellis Island was completed in 1900 with Salem Limestone trimming the red brick.

As with most building stones, use of Salem started locally with workers hauling blocks eight miles for the foundation and window sills of a county courthouse in 1819. The first quarry opened eight years later but little stone made it outside Indiana until the railroad reached Bedford and Bloomington in 1853.

The big break for Salem quarriers came in 1871 when Chicago burned to the ground. Within a few years, Indiana quarrymen had set up shop to promote their stone. One promoter wrote, “This purity insures absolute integrity on exposures to the fumes of coal, while the perfect elasticity and flexibility of the mass render it invulnerable to the forces of cold and heat, air and moisture.” Others claimed that the stone cleaned itself and that it had withstood the ice age “scarcely changed in any part.”

The Salem soon became the stone of Chicago. In 1889 William Vanderbilt ordered 25 carloads for a mansion on Fifth Avenue and his august imprimatur spurred others to follow. Within a decade Salem dominated markets in Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Cincinnati, Kansas City, and Cedar Rapids.

Several aspects of Salem Limestone combined to make everyone from Odd Fellows to opera fans incorporate the stone in their structures. Stone masons can cut, plane, flute, and carve the Salem easily and in all directions and once shaped, Salem hardens over time. It splits evenly, and in any direction. When rock had to bear the weight of a building, Salem excelled because of its low compressibility. When stone became a skin hanging on a steel skeleton, Salem remained popular because of its ease in cutting.

Changes in architectural fashions also helped sell Salem Limestone. In the last quarter of the 19^th century, architects turned away from the dark, somber stones, such as brownstone, that dominated cities in the eastern United States. Salem Limestone also benefited from the growth of coal-fired plants, because Salem stones did not disintegrate under attack by coal-generated pollution like other limestones. (As geologist David Dale Owen wrote in 1838, Salem Limestone “would imbibe less water.”) By 1928, the peak year of production, Indiana quarries provided 70% of all exterior building stone used in the United States.

Salem Limestone quarries are still active, shipping rock as far as Japan and Turkey. In the United States, Salem-clad buildings occur in all 50 states, and include 27 state capitols, 750 post offices, and 200-plus courthouses. It is the most commonly used building stone in the country.

The Clam That Changed the World - Chapter 5

Hardly anyone thinks that clams changed the world. Most are benign, industrious critters toiling away in the sand or resting quietly in the sea. If we do consider them, it’s mostly because many are edible and some produce valuable, nacre-coated irritants worn as fashion. Perhaps the most famous bivalve in the world is the one that supports Venus in Botticelli’s legendary painting, The Birth of Venus. Botticelli depicts the Roman Goddess of beauty and love using the shell as a mode of transport as she arrives on land, blown by the winds. Although unrealistic as a way to travel, Botticelli’s shell does fit the classic image of a bivalve, something trod under foot.

Castillo de San Marcos, courtesy of National Park Service

Thus some find it odd that a bivalve, in particular a much smaller clam than the one that carried the lovely Venus, was seminal to the early history of colonization of North America. Carolina governor James Moore was the first to discover the power of the clam when he lay siege to the Spanish town of St. Augustine, Florida, in 1702. Moore attacked St. Augustine with 800 men, which forced all of the town’s residents into their recently completed fort, known as Castillo de San Marcos.

For six weeks, Moore bombarded the Castillo, but with no luck. Cannonballs either bounced off of or stuck in the fort without breaking the walls. What was the miraculous building material? It was an unusual variety of limestone called coquina (Spanish for “little shell”), which outcrops along the northern Florida coast. It formed 110,000 years ago as billions of bivalves accumulated on beaches. By far the most abundant bivalve is the coquina clam, Donax variabilis, the clam that changed the world.

Moore eventually abandoned his nefarious plans and retreated back to Carolina. Thirty years later the English tried once more to take St. Augustine. Again they failed because of the coquina, leading one British soldier to express “[it] will not splinter but will give way to a cannon ball as though you would stick a knife into cheese." Without the clam, one can argue that the English would have succeeded in invading St. Augustine, driven the Spanish out of Florida, and who knows how the world would have turned out.

But because of the clam, no armed force ever took St. Augustine. The Castillo still stands, a wonderful tribute to the power of stone to influence architecture, history, and politics.

Earmarks and geology

There has been a big stink of late in Seattle about a proposal by our congressional representative, Jim McDermott, to obtain $250,000 for a tony social club in the city. Seems that The Rainier Club is having issues with some of its windows and wants to rehab them. Unfortunately, the club's members have been willing to pony up only half the cash for repair work. This is where McDermott has stepped in. He included money for the club as part of a number of requests he made to the House Appropriations Committee.

Rainier Club from Wikipedia

Since the local paper reported the story, readers have expressed much indignation. How could such a club, long a haven restricted to men only, get money in such dire times?

I don't want to comment exclusively on the request, but would like to point out something that no one has noted - the repair work would be for window sills made of Salem Limestone. The builders of the Club's home used the 330-million- year old Indiana rock as a contrast to the main building material, brick, both inside and outside. Of particular note is the low exterior wall next to the sidewalk, a place I often stop on my building stone tours because of its excellent display of fossils. These include bryozoans, crinoids, and brachiopods. Ironically, quarry workers in Indiana consider this fossiliferous stone to be of inferior quality, mostly because it is less homogeneous than other layers of the Salem.

I think that providing money for the Rainier Club is rather absurd but I am loath to completely criticize McDermott. I can certainly think of worse ways to spend our federal money than on Salem Limestone.

The Most Beautiful Building Stone in the Country

My favorite liquor store in the country is in Morton, Minnesota. It’s an odd sort of store, mostly bar, with a small section up front where one can buy bottles. I, of course, don’t like it for its alcohol selection, but for its architecture, or more particularly its cladding. I am guessing but feel confident that no other liquor store in the country, perhaps in the world, is built with older stone. The rock that covers the liquor store is the 3.5-billion-year old Morton Gneiss, what one geologist calls “the most beautiful building stone in the country.”

Rectangular, two stories tall, and clad partially in brick, the Morton liquor store has a practical appearance, though it does incorporate some semblance of an aesthetic with the cornice and frieze. They have a pattern of outlined squares atop two, horizontal rows of raised bricks, which rest on another row of inverted, stepped pyramids. A faded red awning adds another touch of character, boldly proclaiming in large white letters, MORTON LIQUOR.

The gneiss starts below the cornice. Pink and black layers swirl around each other as if they are still fluid. Other layers look stretched and torn like taffy. Four inch-wide eyes of black minerals, complete with white eyebrows, dot the variegated layers. I cannot imagine trying to contemplate this wall of stone after spending a few hours partaking of the goods sold within.

Known in the trade as Rainbow Granite, the stone has been quarried in Morton since 1884. Cold Spring Granite has longed owned the quarry, which is opened on a limited basis. Because of the stone’s unusual color and patterns, it was a popular building material during the 1920s and 1930s, when Art Deco architecture was all the rage.

The Qwest Building in Minneapolis, originally the Northwestern Bell Telephone Building, built 1930-1932

Morton clad structures can be found around the country. The tallest is in New York, the 952-foot high AIG building (formerly Cities Service). The most northern is in Seattle, the Seattle Exchange Building. The closest to John Wayne’s birthplace in Winterset, Iowa, is in Des Moines, the Bankers Life Insurance Building. The most recently converted to lofts is in Birmingham, Alabama, the Watts Building.

Up close with the Morton Gneiss

Geologists had long known that the Morton Gneiss was very old but not until 1956 when Samuel Goldich and three other geologists published a crystallization date of 2.4 billion years did geologists learn how old. Previously, geologists had simply used undated terms such as primitive, Huronian, and Archean. Seven years after Goldich’s discovery, Ed Catanzaro pushed the date back to 3.2 billion years, the oldest age so far determined on this continent. Not to be outdone, Goldich reanalyzed the Morton and came up with a date of 3.55 billion years. In November 1974, the rock became even older when Goldich reported the Morton was 3.8 billion years old, not just the oldest rocks on North America but the oldest rocks on Earth. As one can imagine there was much rejoicing.

The Morton Gneiss Quarry, in Morton

Fame was fleeting though. By 1980, the age of the Morton had dropped back to 3.5 billion years. In 2006, Pat Bickford, emeritus professor of petrology at Syracuse University, led a team of researchers who obtained the Morton’s most up to date age of 3,524 million years. Although the Morton is but a babe compared to the oldest rocks on Earth, it is still the oldest, most commonly used building stone in the world. And, in my opinion, one of the best looking.