Cobblestone Landmarks of New York

In the preceding post I introduced the York State Book Cobblestone Landmarks of New York State and mentioned that finding the book in a used bookstore was the occasion of learning about this mildly exotic architectural form largely particular to New York State. This post primarily serves to share the introduction to the book which gives a thorough overview of the form and how it came into being as well as some other notes. Here it is:

THE STONES AND THE STYLE  Our upstate cobblestone landmarks are works of art created by pioneer craftsmen in the middle of the nineteenth century. Using an Ice Age residue of glacially rounded native stones, those craftsmen of the 1830s and 1840s perfected a form of folk art that was without precedent in America. For approximately thirty years they created a variety of decorative walls on hundreds of buildings. Today their creations are unique among all those structures erected in the Great Lakes region before the Industrial Revolution rendered such craftsmanship economically obsolete.             The evolution of the humble cobblestone began 325-475 million years ago. During the Ordovician, Silurian and Devonian periods of the Paleozoic Era all of the Great Lakes region west of the present Hudson Valley was a great shallow salt sea filled with the living creatures whose remains, falling to the bottom, gradually formed layers of limestone deposits. Erosion of the young Appalachian Mountains, a more ancient land mass to the east of this salty sea, washed down additional layers of sand and clay, depositing these in thicknesses of thousands of feet. Under enormous pressure, these various layers of sediment became limestone, dolomite, sandstone and shale. Finally, some 250 million years ago, as the salty, sediment-filled sea dried up and the land mass emerged, new rivers began to cut into and expose our regional sedimentary bedrock. The forces of erosion, pressure, and time that produced this foundation were eventually to form the cobbles that later were wrought from this same bedrock.             In the last million years or so the Ice Age redesigned our landscape. Great juggernaut masses of ice ground loose stones on top of the bedrock surface into a generous supply of cobblestones, smoothing the bedrock surface as well. Advancing slowly down from Labrador, these glaciers and ice sheets picked up rock rubble and carried it south. Thus, in addition to polishing and redistributing the loose fragments of local sedimentary sandstone and limestone, the ice mass brought with it a small number of harder Canadian metamorphic stones, such as gneiss and quartzite, which were tumbled and crushed along the way. These stones were eventually left on the land when the ice melted. Geologists call this glacial deposit of rocky debris over the bedrock layer the till sheet or drift mantle. The layman knows it as topsoil or subsoil.             There are two types of till or drift deposits: ice-laid and water-laid. Stones from an ice-laid deposit are roughly rounded fragments of many sizes and kinds of rock. These are what have come to be called field cobbles; perhaps more properly they should be called glaciated cobbles. The glaciated cobbles are found predominantly in the drumlin areas of central and western New York, between Rochester and Syracuse. In contrast, stones from water-laid deposits have had their sharp edges rounded and their surfaces smoothed. These are the stones that were released from the ice and then subjected to additional tumbling action in glacial-born waters of streams and lakes. These water-rounded cobbles are found predominantly in the moraine areas of central and western New York. Lake Ontario’s preset shoreline for the most part is lined with water-rounded stones, and here wave action continues the process of cobblestone polishing. Thus, through the advent of natural forces a natural building material was deposited and shaped in central and western New York.             Following the American Revolution, settlers began to push, and be pushed, westward into new lands in central and western New York. Initially, surviving and conquering the forested land were their immediate concerns. Forests had to be cleared to provide farm lands on which food crops might be planted. The houses they built first on their new land were usually log, or hand-hewn frame cabins, although virgin hardwood forests of maple, beech, and oak did not surrender easily to the farmers axe. To the first generation of farmers the axe, broadaxe, froe, saw, and other woodworking tools were no less important then the plow. With these tools the farmer began many years of forest removal and with them put up his rude log or frame cabin in the forest clearing. Sawmills, gristmills, and other water-powered mills were rapidly constructed wherever streams could be dammed. Locally milled lumber was a necessary luxury when increasing numbers of farm buildings were needed for a completely self-sufficient farm economy.             The farmer’s remaining woodlots of uncleared land supplied fuel and free construction materials for the growing farm complex. With a broadaxe, felled trees were squared into massive beams and then pegged together to form the skeletons of barns, animal shelters, stables, carriage, wood sheds, granaries, and other farm buildings. Split logs and fieldstones became fences. Lumber for walls and floors was cut at the closest sawmill. Hand-split wooden shingles made excellent roofs and siding. As the necessities of life were secured, larger frame houses replaced the log cabins to accommodate growing families. Between 1800 and 1820 brickyards, stone quarries, lime kilns, and glass factories appeared in every corner of the state to offer farmers and townsfolk alike a choice between wood, brick, or stone construction.             In central and western New York settling the land proceeded slowly, due mainly to the scarcity of natural transportation routes. Waterways were the simplest mode of transportation, and west of the Mohawk River there was scarcely anything of this sort. In 1817, following an unsuccessful attempt to have the federal government build an artificial waterway to the West, New York State started the project on its own. Derisively called Clinton’s Ditch by its opponents (in honor of the governor and principal proponent), the Erie Canal began to thread its way westward to Lake Erie. The canal required construction workers with various skills, among them masons to quarry and lay stone for canal locks and aqueducts. To build these the remnant of the prehistoric sea – limestone – was quarried for stone blocks. Quarried limestone was also crushed and burned to produce lime for the mortar with which these blocks were laid. The canal provided the first opportunity for subsistence farmers to become cash crop farmers, for their crops could now be carried back east to established centers of population. In 1825 the canal was finally connected with Lake Erie, linking the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean via waterways across New York State. From New England more Yankee farmers came with the marketing of their wheat, flour, and other cash crops on the Atlantic seaboard.             The newly prosperous farmers were now able to build houses reflecting this prosperity and their confidence in the future. Building materials in those days usually came from the immediate area, and only in rare instances were they transported great distances, as is common now. Central and western New York had, in addition to timber and clay for bricks, all the stones, gravel and sand left by the glaciers of long ago. Sometime after 1825 the first cobblestone building was constructed in upstate New York, probably in Wayne or Monroe Country, and the cobblestone era was begun. We do not know which building was the first, where it was, or who the mason was. In the years to come virtually every type of building was constructed in this regional mode, incorporating within them the most popular architectural styles of the early nineteenth century. The majority of cobblestone buildings are in the Greek Revival style, which appeared in western New York about 1835. Those constructed before this date are in the Federal style. Gothic revival and Italianate style cobblestone buildings are relatively few. Cobblestone Landmarks of NY State             While most of the cobblestone structures built were farmhouses, since most upstate New Yorkers were farmers, cobblestone structures were built in villages and cities also, including a business block in Batavia, a reaper manufacturing building in Perry, a warehouse in Palmyra, and an agricultural equipment factory in Macedon, all razed years ago.              In all more than 700 cobblestone buildings were built in the counties to the south of Lake Ontario. Most are concentrated on the Lake Ontario Plain and among the Finger Lakes, but some isolated examples were built as far south as Bath, Elmira, and Cortland. Wayne County exceeds all others with over 180 documented buildings. Monroe, Orleans, and Ontario Counties each record about 100 buildings. There is even a cobblestone house in Colorado, built by a Monroe County man who went west after the Civil War. Octagonal house, Madison Cty, Rt. 20 (from the book) The same house today (photo mine)             Following the frontier, New Yorkers soon carried the craft west to new farms and villages in southern Ontario, Canada, southern Michigan, and beyond Lake Michigan as far as Beloit, Wisconsin. Chester Clark of Marion, NY, whose 1838 letters to the Genesee Farmer and Gardener’s Journal provide us with an early document of the art, and his brothers introduced cobblestone masonry in 1844 to Beloit, where they built the Smith-Gaston house and several more prior to 1863. Levi Boughton learned the cobblestone craft in Monroe County and took it to Paris, Ontario, Canada, in 1838. There twelve houses and churches were built.             Thus on both sides of the Illinois-Wisconsin border the second largest group of American cobblestone buildings appeared in the 1840s and 1850s. In fact, much of the best cobblestone work in Wisconsin and southern Michigan is located in or near places with transplanted New York names such as Rochester, Geneva, Troy, Farmington, Palmyra, Genesee and Walworth.             A much less significant number of cobblestone structures is found scattered in a thin line eastward through the Mohawk Valley to Guilderland in Albany County, and Bennington and Brattleboro, Vermont. Eight hundred and fifty miles and almost as many cobblestone buildings separate Brattleboro from Beloit, but the dates clearly indicate that the idea moved west and east from its origin in upstate New York. From Shelgren, Lattin & Frasch’s Cobblestone Landmarks of New York State. Coolidge House, Bouckville, Rt. 20 (from the book)   Above photos (mine) of Coolidge House, Bouckville, NY Rt. 20 today a charming inn and beautiful ground floor bar. For anyone interested in visiting New York's cobblestone houses Cobblestone Quest: Road Tours of New York's Historic Buildings by Rich and Sue Freeman © 2005 Footprint Press organizes extant structures in 17 loop tours within the counties between Buffalo and Syracuse. The book elaborates on the history and diagrams details of the architectural style over a dozen or so pages. Reproductions are pretty low grade but it is a good resource for visiting the buildings.