Tag: building stone

Best Building Stone Site on the Web

By far the most interesting site on the web for building stone is Peggy and Pat Perazzo’s Stone Quarries and Beyond.  Clearly a labor of love, the site is packed full of photographs, scans of articles, details about quarrying, and state by state lists of buildings and their stone—basically everything one could want on building stone history. 

From Stone Quarries and Beyond

Of the two, Peggy is the collector and organizer and Pat is the web master.  Peggy’s interest in stone started in a graveyard.  In the late 1990s, as part of a class she was taking on local history at Los Medanos community college, in Pittsburg, California, Peggy decided to survey and photograph stones in local cemeteries.  She wondered where the stones came from and discovered that such information was not easy to find.  When she did locate a point of origin she found that much of the marble, limestone, and granite wasn’t quarried nearby.

Some stone arrived from other areas of California but tons came from Vermont and Italy.  Finished cemetery stones (minus such important info as name or dates) are called blanks and could be ordered through places such as Vermont Marble Co., but also Sears and Roebuck and Montgomery Wards.  Finding who sent the rock, however, didn’t always help.  For example, Vermont Marble had quarries as far away as Alaska. 

From Stone Quarries and Beyond

From cemetery stones, she expanded out to bridges, buildings, and other structures and then attempted to match the stone with its origin quarry.  As her piles of data grew, she decided to establish a web site.  “I already was maintaining a genealogy/history web site for the Yolo County CAGen Web Project for which Pat was the web master,” says Peggy.  He agreed again to help.  “It’s a joke between us now that he thought he could get it done in two or three weeks!”  The web site went on line in 2001 and the Perazzos add content practically daily. They report that they had over 2,000,000 hits in 2008.

Peggy’s favorite part of putting together the web site is researching the state by state listings.  “It’s like I’m touring the state in person and meeting the people,” she says.  Each state has its own personality.  “Researching coastal states is very interesting because of the sea transportation and quarrying along the coast; but when you go inland, you find other kinds of quarrying and people.”  

Her state sections are the site’s most useful and interesting.  Each one lists geology resources, research resources, quarries, quarry links, and background history.  In addition, Peggy has put together a list of structures and monuments that use that state’s stone.  It is an astounding amount of information, particularly the accumulation, copying, and posting of historical articles and pictures.

“My biggest surprise is learning how really important and publicly valued the quarry industry was to our country in the 1800s and early in the 1900s, although our quarry industry is very “young” compared to the industry in other countries, Peggy says.  “Many times people see these “holes” in the ground as eyesores; but if you read the old magazine articles, the stone industry was well respected, well-known as producers and employers, and valued in the past.”  Fortunately for many, Peggy and Pat are helping to make sure those stories will stay alive. 

What’s In A Name

As someone interested in names and what they mean, I am regularly intrigued by the terms used in the building stone trade.  Often the names give an insight to place of origin.  For example, we have the world famous Carrara marble, nationally known Georgia Cherokee Marble, or locally recognized Tenino Sandstone (from Tenino, Washington).  Stone names can also convey color, such as Coral Red Granite, Black Ice Marble, and Blue Pearl, or texture, Roxbury Puddingtone, Birdseye Marble, and Tapestry Granite.

Names, however, can also mislead.  Minnesota’s Rainbow granite is a 3.5-billion-year old gneiss, which happens to be the oldest commonly used building stone in the world. (Ironically, one correctly labeled class of granites, called rapakivi, gives too much information as rapakivi is the Finnish word for crumbly.)  The other commonly mislabeled rock is limestone, often called marble, even ones such as the fossil-rich Treuchtlingen marble from Germany. 

 3.5 bya Morton gneiss aka Rainbow granite

The more fascinating stones come with a story.  The island of Chios has produced portasanta, a stone often compared to roast beef in color and texture; its name translates to holy door, a reference to its use as door jambs at St. Peter’s.  From France comes another reddish rock, Cervelatte Marble, a named derived from is similarity to sausage made in Switzerland and Germany.  Cervelatte comes from the Latin cerebrum, in reference to the brains formerly used in the sausage.

 Portasanta

One of the world’s most famous marbles is that used in the Parthenon in Athens. Roman stone cutters knew of the white marble as Marmo Greco Fetido (fetid Greek marble) and Marmo cipolla (onion marble), because “when sawn it emits a fetid odour,” wrote Mary Winearls Porter in What Rome Was Built With: A Description of the Stones Employed in Ancient Times for its Building and Decoration.  This is not an unusual phenomenon; organic remains in the rock can disintegrate and form a sulfurous gas, which gets trapped in the crystal lattice.  Breaking the stone releases the gas.  Cutting to the chase, the British labeled their odoriferous rock Stink Stone.

The Brits also have many ancient words sprinkled into their stone names. Kentish Rag utilizes a word first used in 1272 to refer to any “sedimentary rock readily broken into thick slabs as paving” or so says the OED.  The commonly used freestone also appeared at this time, compared with sandstone, which was not used until 1668. And then there’s clunch, which sounds like a stomach ailment, but actually refers to hard layers of the chalk marl in Cambridgeshire.

My favorite name, however, comes from Brazil.  I don’t know what it means but simply like the sound of Uba Tuba.  What’s your favorite stone name?