Moab's Building Stone: Questions Remain

Ah, Moab, My Moab. For the first time, I decided to see what I could find out about the local building stone. I hadn’t noticed the stone much during the nine years that I lived there in late 1980s and early 1990s. Why would I? I had the most stunning rocks in the world to look at all around me. Now that I am older and wiser, I looked more closely at the few buildings of rock in the land of red rocks.

The best known building of stone is Star Hall. The locals used red rock, what those in the east call brownstone. At present, Star Hall is used for plays, concerts, films, and the like. It is a simple, yet elegant design with a gambrel-style roof and arched windows. Some have called the building Richardsonian Romanesque though it lacks the true rough hewn nature of blocks that I associate with that style but then I am not an architectural historian.

As one might expect of a building erected in 1905 in rural Utah, it was built by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or the Mormons. These wild and crazy early pioneers sought a meeting and recreational hall. In Grand Memories, a history of the area published by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, it states that Will Shafer, a carpenter, designed the building; Steve Day quarried the stone; Will Bliss hauled the stone (making four trips a day with his wagon team); and Angus Murray Stocks, a well known mason, dressed the stone. They began working sometime in the spring of 1905 and finished in May 1906.

According to Grand Memories, Day and Bliss got the rock at the “Goose Island stone quarry about a mile above the river spring.” The spring has long been known as Matrimony Spring and until 2008 emerged out of pipe a few hundred yards up Utah SR-128. (Southeastern Utah District Health Environmental Health Scientist Jim Adamson declared the spring contaminated and closed it to public access. At present, you can still access the spring, which now flows directly out of the wall. By the way, if you look carefully under the water at the spring you can see several three-toed tracks, probably dinosaur but possibly pterosaur.)

View of Kayenta Formation at Goose Island

During my visit to Moab, I tried to locate any evidence of a quarry at Goose Island. The area is the first broad bench of rock up the Colorado River and dominated primarily by the Kayenta Formation, a Jurassic age fluvial sandstone. I could find no evidence of any quarry though I did find a neat piece of metal buried in the sand. I suspect that there was no formal quarry and that Day probably just blasted or broke off pieces of rock, which Stocks shaped on site at Star Hall. I also tried to locate any evidence of why Goose Island is called Goose Island and had the same lack of luck.

View from area above Goose Island (where are the geese and where is the island?)

I was also told by a local resident that the Star Hall stone was quarried further up river at Jackass Canyon. The canyon is across the road from the Hal Canyon campground. This area seems less likely as a quarry spot because the slopes consist of rocks of the Moenkopi Formation and Chinle Formation, neither of which would make good building material. Both units are too soft. Of course, Day could have cut stone from debris blocks that had fallen from the rock units above the Chinle and Moenkopi but there is no way to verify this. Plus why would Day travel five miles further to get rocks.

Ultimately, I have to go with the original source of Goose Island though I write this without complete confidence. The stones in Star Hall don’t really look like the Kayenta; they seem too pink but they are fresh, cleaned surfaces as opposed to the weathered rocks found in nature. Any additional insights would be appreciated.

Back to the Beginning: A Reading in Moab

Long ago when I graduated from college, I ended up in Moab, Utah. It was here that I truly fell under the spell of rocks. For the next nine years, I hiked, biked, canoed, backpacked, and explored the red rock country of southern Utah. It was a geologist's paradise with few of those pesky green things called trees getting in the way of seeing stone.

Now, for the first time since my book Stories in Stone was published I am going back to Moab. While there, I will give a reading at one of my favorite bookstores, Back of Beyond Books. The sister store to Arches Bookstore, Back of Beyond (or Bob, as I call it) focuses on regional books, with new, used, and antiquarian selections, including first editions of many Edward Abbey books. It will be an honor and pleasure to talk about how my time in Moab led me down the path to focus on the cultural and natural history of building stone.

The reading will be at 7:00 P.M. on Thursday, September 9. It should be a fun time!

Fossils in our Nation's Capital

No, the title doesn't refer to the ancient beasts roaming the halls of Congress though I do wish some of them would go the way of dinosaurs. Instead, I want to highlight a web site I just learned about. It is Fossils in the Architecture of Washington, DC: A Guide to Washington's Accidental Museum of Paleontology. The site has been put together by Christopher Barr, a lawyer who has lived in DC since 1979. As the name implies, the site's goal is "to describe, or at least list, all of the public fossils occurring in Washington's architectural landscape."

A Jurassic ammonite from the Reptile House at the National Zoo (pinched from DC Fossils)

Barr has done a first rate job of assembling a thorough list of the fossil-rich buildings throughout the capital. For each building, he provides an introduction on what you can see, where to see it, and a history of the building. In some cases, he also speculates why a particular stone was chosen. He then provides photos (with helpful scales) of the fossils, which he describes in detail, providing geologic background. Finally, he documents who helped him and where one can obtain more background information. Nowhere else have I found such a well-put-together site about urban fossils.

An Ordovician nautiloid in the National Gallery of Art (pinched from DC Fossils)

Urban fossils are amazing resources and offer an excellent way to get people interested in fossils, deep time, evolution, and geology in general. Plus, as Barr has done, these fossils are a great way to get people to think about human history. He does list a many of the guides that are available but it is such a small list considering the wonderful fossils found in the urban environment. I hope that Barr's site can inspire other urban paleontologists to do the same thing in their cities.

Edward Drinker Cope: His Home Inside and Out

Probably every geology-oriented person knows about Edward Drinker Cope and his well-financed, nasty battle with Othniel Charles Marsh but probably fewer know about his stone-fronted house in Philadelphia. Today, I aim to try and fix this sorry dearth of knowledge by focusing on said home. Like many aspects of Cope’s life, a bit of controversy surrounds it.

From Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science blog

Cope owned two adjacent row houses, at 2100 and 2102 Pine Street. They are classic Second Empire with a mansard roof pierced with dormers and prominent projecting bay windows. He acquired the property in 1885 and initially lived around the corner. 2102 Pine served as his laboratory. The house sounds like a wonderful chaotic mess. His friend and biographer Henry Osborn once wrote:

“The first floor became a storeroom for boxes and cases. At the back of the second floor was Cope’s study and the editorial room of the American Naturalist [Cope purchased the magazine in 1877 and owned it until his death. During that time he wrote 776 articles. Ironically, Marsh’s uncle, George Peabody, had provided the money that funded the Peabody Academy of Sciences, where the magazine was initially published.]…This room always contained some of the more interesting fossils, which were brought in from the storeroom when Cope was working upon them. The front room on the second floor was entirely filled with shelves on which stood paper boxes, containing the smaller objects in Cope’s Permian and Pampean collections. On the third floor back was the preparation room, presided over by the genial Jacob Geismar…Around the floor of Cope’s study there always wandered a venerable tortoise. To the left of his study table was a vivarium, which contained a ‘Gila monster’.”

The controversy centers on exactly what type of stone clads the three-and-a-half-story row house about a mile south of the Academy of Natural Sciences. According to the nomination for the National Register of Historic Places, written in 1975, the house is faced “with a green stone peculiar to Philadelphia.” This would mean a serpentine, a stone first used in the early 1700s. Several local quarries provided the building material, which historian Berenice M. Ball wrote “suited the romantic architectural ideas of the late 1800s perfectly.”

I am not sure, however, what the person who wrote the nomination was thinking. All recent photos of the building clearly show that a white stone faces the house. (The building was not refaced, as you can see that the 1975 image and modern one have the same stone.) Perhaps the author did not visit the house or was colorblind.

From National Register of Historic Places Nomination

As I started to ask around, I found that no one knew what the white stone was. One person suggested that it might be Cockeysville Marble, a stone I previously wrote about for its use in the Washington Monument. An architectural historian thought that a local limestone from Montgomery County, PA, clad the structure. Both are possibilities as both were used in the area, although the Cockeysville appears to have been less popular. My trusty 1880 census of the building stone industry notes that the Montgomery limestone (actually a marble found locally within the limestone belt) was popular from the late 1700s till at least 1840 so. It was used for the U. S. Customs House and U.S. Mint, as well as for the sarcophagi of George and Martha Washington.

If anyone knows what stone was used, please let me know.

Unfortunately, failed mining ventures in New Mexico and Colorado depleted Cope’s wealth and around 1881 he mortgaged the laboratory at 2102 Pine and in 1885 leased his Pine Street residence. He and his wife moved around the corner. Cope eventually sold much of his collection to the American Museum of Natural History but as a visit near the end of his life from the artist Charles Knight reveals, the house was still full.

“Inside, everything was unique and completely dust covered. Never have I seen such a curious place—just like the kind Dickens would have loved. Piles of pamphlets rose from the floor to ceiling in every narrow hallway, leaving just enough room to squeeze by them and no more…Dust lay thick here as elsewhere, and the place was absolutely bare of furniture and hangings. No pictures, no curtains, nothing but petrified skeletons of extinct monsters…”

Cope died at home on April 12, 1897. He was 57 years old. Jane Davidson in her revisionist biography of Cope notes that the houses are now subdivided into six to eight apartments each. A sign identifying the house and Cope stands in front of the building.

From Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science blog

Mystery Solved: Bones found in Bridge

On August 19, 1969, a short article appeared in the New York Times about the solving of an 85-year-old fossil legend. The story began on October 20, 1884, when workers at a small quarry near Manchester, Connecticut, discovered fossils in several blocks of brownstone. Word of the bones soon reached legendary paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh, but before all of the fossil-rich blocks could be saved, several went into a bridge over Bigelow Brook in South Manchester. They remained there until the Connecticut highway department decided to replace the bridge, when Yale professor John Ostrom acquired the blocks and found the long lost fossils.

The bridge over Hop Creek at Bridge Street, now demolished. While stone for this bridge was being quarried at Buckland, dinosaurs were found." Photo by Sylvian Ofiara in The Manchester Evening Herald. Published in A New England Pattern by William E. Buckley, 1973. Used courtesy of Manchester Historical Society

The quarry, owned by Charles O. Wolcott, pulled stone out of the Portland Formation, a 200-million-old sandstone deposited into a rift valley on the eastern margin of North America. Out of quarries of this stone in other parts of the Connecticut River Valley came most of the brownstone used in New York City and Boston. The major quarry was in Portland, Connecticut, about 15 miles southwest of Manchester. A shopping mall now covers the Wolcott quarry.

According to Marsh’s notes, the block was “half as large as an ordinary dining table.” It supposedly contained the front end of a dinosaur that Marsh initially named Anchisaurus major, which he changed to Ammosaurus in 1891. He was able to name the dinosaur from the remains of the hind end that had been found in a block saved for him. Over the next few years two other dinosaur specimens came out of the same quarry. Marsh named them Anchisaurus colorus and A. solus, in 1891 and 1892, respectively. Both also were renamed later. A colorus became Yaleosaurus and A. solus became Ammosaurus solus.

The Times article reported that Ostrom spent two years surveying more than 60 bridges in the region and finally concluded with 95% certainty that the notorious block had gone into a bridge over Hop Brook. (A study by Peter Galton in 1976 noted that there had been some confusion in the records, which lead to the search.) When news reached Ostrom about the bridge’s soon-to-happen destruction, he contacted the highway crew, which readily agreed to allow Ostrom and a crew to examine some 400 sandstone blocks over a two-day-period. Local elementary school teacher Richard Sanders found the first bone, a rib. Shortly thereafter, laboratory technician Rebekah Smith noticed a larger bone, a femur.

Over the next few years Peter Galton conducted a detailed study (Postilla 169, 1976) of all of the prosauropods (now called basal sauropodomorphs) from North America, including the new bones found in the bridge blocks. He again revised the names of the dinosaurs collected from the Wolcott quarry. Now, just two species remained, what Galton called “the slender-footed Anchisaurus polyzelus” and the “broad footed Ammosaurus major.” The rib came from Ammosaurus but the femur could not be clearly identified.

Skelton of Ammosaurus major from Galton's 1976 study. Based on bones from Wolcott's quarry

Galton's study, however, did not end the confusion over the fossils from Wolcott's quarry. In the subsequent years, various paleontologists have debated which species the bones came from. Were there two species as Galton initially concluded, or one (A. major) as Paul Sereno (Special Papers in Palaeontology 77, 261-289) concluded in 2007 or one (A. polyzelus) as Adam Yates (Palaeontology 53:4, 739-752) concluded in 2010? Clearly the legendary bones still contain a bit of mystery.

Family Hour in Seattle: Squirrels and Crows

Warning. This post has nothing to do with geology.

It has been a busy hour for families in my neighborhood. For the past ten minutes or so, I have been watching a strange little manifestation of urban flight as a family moved up the block in what appears to be a case of escaping a bad situation. I first noticed the migration when I saw a gray squirrel trotting along the telephone wires across from our house. From my desk, I could see that the squirrel carried something large in its mouth, but I wasn’t quick enough to get out my binoculars before it disappeared into a dense spruce.

Twenty seconds later, I saw the squirrel again, headed in the opposite direction across the wire. This time it climbed up a pine, about thirty feet south of the spruce. I had noticed squirrels going into this tree over the past few weeks and figured it harbored a nest. In a half a minute, the squirrel descended and leapt onto the wire. This time I had the binoculars out and could see that she was carrying a baby squirrel, one small arm extended out over mom’s head. Again, she climbed the spruce and vanished in the foliage.

She proceeded to carry over two more youngsters. Each time she seemed to be in a hurry, moving quickly over the wire and only pausing periodically. When she stopped (I know she was a she because I could see nipples), she looked like she was catching her breath. Now she is gone, apparently having moved all of her kids.

What prompted her move? A mammalogist I know speculated that some body or some thing had disturbed her nest. Curiously, we also have a nest of Cooper’s Hawks on our block. They live in a huge Douglas fir down the block. I have also been watching and hearing them. The youngsters, like so many, are easy to tell because they have a whiny sort of call, which I find appealing. The hawks have definitely been causing havoc amongst the other, wilder residents.

Last week, I watched one of the beautiful long-tailed birds sitting high in a Doug fir in our yard eating a smaller bird. I couldn’t see who had become breakfast, but as the hawk bent over and grabbed at the meal in its talons little feathers would flutter down.

A second possibility for the move suggested themselves five minutes or so after the squirrel’s exodus. Two crows landed on the wire above the squirrel’s travel route. They stood a few inches apart before one of them shimmied over and began to use its beak to pick at the neck and head of its neighbor. The one being pecked had that head down look I have when I am getting my neck scratched. AAAH, that feels good.

Crows are known predators and scavengers of other birds and squirrels. In fact, they often get blamed for much urban wildlife depredation, mostly because they operate during the day and get seen with their meals, whereas other carnivores, such as raccoons, generally do their work at night. I know there are raccoons in the area as I saw a large one across the street during the day a few weeks back.

I won’t speculate as to who caused the move. It was fun to watch. And in just a few more weeks, those young squirrels will be on their own, without mom’s protection. Such is the life for all of us.

Arizona Red: Red Rock and Brownstone

Lee Allison at Arizona Geology recently sent me a link to a nifty article about a sandstone quarry in Flagstaff. The article details the history of the use of the Moenkopi Formation sandstone, which sold under the name Arizona Red. Construction of a new fire station prompted the story as it will be built on the site of the old quarry.

The quarry opened in 1888 providing massive blocks of stone for the growing town and quickly attracted the attention of builders around the west. Many buildings with Arizona Red still stand in Flagstaff, including the Coconino County Courthouse, the Babbitt Brothers building (which also contains brick made from Moenkopi derived soils), and a host of structures on the Northern Arizona University campus. By 1910, however, Arizona Red was no longer popular.

Residents of Flagstaff were not the first to use the Moenkopi for building. Beautiful structures with it can be found just north of Flagstaff in Wupatki National Monument. The Sinagua people first started to build here around 675 CE. They moved out of the area just prior to the 1064 eruption of nearby Sunset Crater.

As Marie Jackson noted in her wonderful book Stone Landmarks: Flagstaff's Geology and Historic Building Stones, more than 500 boxcars of Arizona Red were sent to Los Angeles for its county courthouse in 1889. Unfortunately, damage from a 1933 earthquake led to demolition in 1936.

LA County Courthouse From Books about California web site

LA County Courthouse From www.courtinfo.ca.gov/courts/trial/historic/losangeles.htm

Another well-known California edifice made of Arizona Red is the Whittier Mansion in San Francisco. Built between 1894 and 1896, the mansion has had a colorful history of ownership, including shipping and mercantile magnate William Franklin Whittier; the German Reich, for use as a consulate; the United States Government, which seized the building during World War II; and the California Historical Society. It is now a private residence, curiously painted an odd tan/yellow. Perhaps that is why either the ghosts of Whittier or his son have been reported to haunt the house.

Whittier Mansion 1919 from www.noehill.com

Whittier Mansion modern From www.noehill.com

Jackson describes the stone as "rather soft...in which the sand grains are not especially well cemented." This weakness contributed to the stone's downfall in areas wetter than Flagstaff. In particular, she noted that Arizona Red did poorly on the Whittier. That weakness, however, also made it easy for masons to carve elaborate detailing, which can still be seen in buildings in more arid regions.

The Moenkopi Formation extends across the Colorado Plateau and formed between 242 and 237 million years ago. Deposition occurred on a wide coastal plain in a semi-arid environment. Around Flagstaff the sands came from the overflow of streams onto the sand and mudflats. In other areas, the mudflats preserve excellent trace fossils, such as raindrops and reptile tracks. Fine layers of Moenkopi make up the base of many slopes in the canyonlands region of southern Utah.

One final note that ties back to my title for this posting. When I first moved to Boston in 1996 away from Moab, Utah, I sorely missed the red rock canyons of the desert, but as I noted in my book Stories in Stone, I happened upon the brownstone base of Harvard Hall on Harvard's campus. After doing my part as an agent of erosion, I made the simple observation that brownstone and red rock are basically the same thing--a sandstone colored by iron. It was a wonderful day for me as I realized that I could make a deeper connection to geology through building stone.