Cool Stonework

Hope Baptist Church in Boston

I love good stonework. Building with stone is like building with the bones of the earth. It's the ultimate natural building material. In most places here in Massachusetts you can just reach down wherever you're standing, grab a stone and start building something. That's how all these stone walls got here!

 Everywhere I go I stop to study the stonework. Every region has it's particular types of stone and vernacular styles of building with it. It's something you might not notice until you really stop to take a closer look. New England is rich in different types of building stone-granites, limestones, schists, shales, and conglomerates. There's so much stone around here that you don't even notice it after a while.

I want to show you a photo of a church on Tremont Street in Boston. I took the photo walking home after parking my car this afternoon. The stone is local, quarried within walking distance: it's called Roxbury Conglomerate or "puddingstone", a metamorphic stone that's full of little pebbles fused together by volcanic heat and pressure. The more finely wrought corners and window surrounds are limestone probably from the Connecticut valley.

Stop to look at the stones!

I've worked with Roxbury puddingstone and the interesting thing is that although it seems to be completely amorphous (like plum pudding) there is a  grain and it splits very cleanly ( in one direction only) to create parallel faces. I've found the stone to be of widely varying quality and hardness. Some of it just crumbles into pebbles. There are some very interesting old buildings and walls around Boston, Brookline, Roxbury, and Jamaica Plain made out of puddingstone. I have a feeling that in days past there were some places that quarried stone of relatively uniform quality. I don't know of anyplace today where you can buy Roxbury puddingstone but if you're excavating in this area you might get more than you want.

In this building the stone is laid with flush joints in random, almost rubble style. You see this style in Tuscan farmhouses. There is a very sensitive balance between rusticity and formality in the way this stone is laid and in the random sizes of the stones. The rustic puddingstone is made to look somewhat formal but the formal limestone details have a rustic hand-hewn look to them.  I wonder if these stonemasons were Italian?