The Granite Mystery

By Dick Eastman It was late in the fall of 2007, during the church building renovation program, when the rubble wall supporting the eastern end of the old Parish Hall was removed.  Several rough-cut pink granite stones were pulled out.  Phil Pierce recognized these as unusual and suitable for possible use in the Memorial Garden, hence they were saved.  Subsequently, several different contractors commented that this wasn’t local granite.  So, where did this granite come from?  And, how did it end up in our old foundation?

When we were obtaining bids for the Memorial Garden area drainage work, one of the contractors volunteered that this pink granite might have come from Deer Isle, Maine.  An on-line search revealed that Deer Isle granite was a popular granite in the late 1800’s.  It was used for the George Washington Bridge in New York City, in a major monument in the Arlington National Cemetery in Washington D.C., and in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  A few pieces of information may be put together to begin to tell a story.  Let’s examine this list and see if we can find the outline of a story.

• Needham had a rail link to the Back Bay in the 1800’s, passing near the Museum of Fine Arts.
• We know that the railroad carried sand from Needham to fill in the Back Bay.
• Left over granite from the Museum could have been easily transported back to Needham.
• The church was one block from the Needham station, which had a siding.
• First Parish would not spend a lot of money on a foundation, and would be creative in finding building material.
• The church was moved to its present site in 1879.

  * The original Parish Hall was added in 1888.

I decided it was time to take a trip to the Museum and take a look at its stone.  Shockingly, the granite did not at all look like the pink granite from our foundation.  Moreover, I learned that the original location of the Museum of Fine Arts was in Copley Square at what is now the site of the Copley Plaza Hotel.  Furthermore, the 1875 building was a brick building and not a granite building.  Clearly, this building project could not have been a source for the granite in our church foundation. The granite building on Huntington Avenue wasn’t erected until 1908. We’re back to ground zero.

Karl Heinz told me about a trip that he had taken to the Fletcher Granite Company whose quarries are in Chelmsford, MA.  I made a telephone call to the company and arranged a visit with some rock samples for them to look at.  They said that the granite might have come from Westerly, RI.  They really weren’t sure.  Further they thought that the quarries had been closed for about fifty years, but someone had recently started to take out stone for use in an aggregate business. A new lead to pursue!

I was planning a trip to Pennsylvania to visit my sister and decided to add a return stop in Westerly.  An Internet search for Westerly granite revealed a museum, the Babcock-Smith House Museum, and information on sites in Westerly that were constructed with local granite. I could visit these buildings and see if their granite matched our samples.  Further to my astonishment, the Babcock-Smith House Museum listed their granite historian as an individual with the name Isaac Smith. The light bulb in my brain had a major flashback.  My first job out of college was with American Machine & Foundry Company in Greenwich Connecticut.  I lived there in a private home that rented rooms to boarders.  The other boarder was an elderly gentleman named Isaac Smith; a deep voiced jolly Santa Claus like man who had been in the granite business in Westerly!  I had to believe that my fellow boarder who had to be in his sixties in 1956, and the current granite historian had to be related.  I sent an e-mail to Isaac Smith, the historian, telling him about my friendship with one Isaac Smith and that I suspected he was a relative of his.  Further, I told him that I had an interest in finding the source for some of the granite that had been in our church foundation.  I didn’t get a reply.

After visiting my sister, her three sons and their families, I headed toward home.  But first I had breakfast with an old friend from grammar school days.  Don King and I went through twelve years of grade school together, went to the same church and were in Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, and Senior Scouts together.  For the past few years Don has been going to college, part time, at West Chester State studying geology.  He gave me a short course on granite formation.  Granite begins forming when the earth’s mantle starts solidifying and forming the lithosphere.  Here is where granite begins developing unique characteristics that we typically use to identify different granites, characteristics such as color and grain size.  When you look at any granite closely you see particles of many different colors.  These colors and particle sizes result from localized concentrations of different compounds (quartz, feldspar, mica, etc.) during the crystallization process.  Once formed, typically at a temperature slightly below 800 degrees Celsius, some of the solidified material sometimes makes a very slow journey to the earth’s surface, a trip that can typically be 50 miles in length.  We find granite in local outcroppings all over the world.  Geologists have several different hypotheses as to how these outcroppings occur. But clearly, they do occur.

After an over-night visit with my daughter and her family in Westport, CT, I head off to Westerly.  In Westerly I visited the Hebbs, friends I had originally met in Florida.  I pulled into their driveway, got out of my car and noticed a recently installed parking area beside the driveway covered with crushed rock, pink granite stone.  I immediately kneeled down and began examining the stones.  They clearly matched the pink granite from our foundation.  I could hardly believe the answer came so quickly.  After lunch the three of us headed over to the Babcock-Smith House Museum.  We learned about the Smith Granite Company, saw a photo of the Ike Smith that I knew, as well as a photo of his son who is the granite historian for the museum.  We also learned that in addition to quarrying pink granite, the Smith Granite Company also had blue granite quarries and white granite quarries.  All of this was satisfying; the pink granite sample at the museum again matched our foundation stone samples.  But, how did granite from Westerly end up in Needham?   We obtained information about Isaac Smith, the son, from the museum personnel.  I made a phone call, introduced myself, and told Mr. Smith about a few adventures I had with his Dad, including a few evening visits to some monument shops in Connecticut where we were always warmly received.  As to the question of how would rough-cut granite end up in Needham he had no answers.  He had the sales records for the firm from the mid 1800’s.  He explained that in the granite business you shipped finished stone.  The shipping costs were too high to justify shipping rough-cut stone very far. The Smith Granite Company didn’t sell rough-cut stone.  He did say that in the 1920’s there was an exception and some rough-cut pink granite was shipped to a quarry in Quincy, probably to be reworked there for some special trim features.  But this doesn’t get us to having granite in Needham by 1888.  I returned to Needham with my mind searching for possible answers as to how Westerly granite might have ended up in Needham.

I looked at the samples again; they certainly appeared to match.  I looked at the photos I had taken of the stones when they were lying in the courtyard before being placed in the finished Memorial Garden.  I saw that there were pink granite stones in the Sanctuary foundation that matched those taken out of the east end of Parish Hall.  I then examined all of the exposed foundation and found several pink granite stones.  Clearly, the 1879 foundation and the 1888 foundation used the same type of stone.  Was there some repair work done along the way?  We know that the area under the church was excavated by hand in the mid 1920’s when Fuller Hall was constructed.  I placed a call to Frank Olney, our building renovation architect, and asked him if the rubble wall construction that we found in the building was typical of a mid 1920’s construction style or an 1880’s style.  He said that there would be no difference. Foundation styles didn’t change in this time frame.  I called Ruth Sutro, explained the problem, and asked if we had any old photos of the church in the 1880’s that showed the foundation. She found two in the parlor display case.  A brief study revealed that there have been clear changes to the original (1870-1880) foundation.  Ruth also uncovered a 1994 letter from Donald Mitchell, the brother of Elizabeth McKinley. Mitchell’s letter was written in response to a letter sent to him by Jack Gotthardt who was working on a church history.  Mitchell had worked for Arthur Lyman, the contractor for the 1927-28 renovations, and had actually done some of the excavation work himself.  Mitchell tells of punching holes in the west foundation wall under the sanctuary so that long steel beams could be inserted through to the east foundation wall to support the full span of the sanctuary floor.

Ruth and I made another visit to examine the foundation more closely.  The old photos show only a few foundation windows, not the number that we have today.  Further, two distinct styles of joint mortar are clearly recognizable.  The original joints were finished off with a raised bead line.  The latter joints carry a simple scribed line or no line. In conclusion, it is apparent that substantial foundation work was done in the late 20’s.  The pink granite stones that we find in the foundation undoubtedly are a result of the ’27-’28 renovation.  Thus, our most likely explanation for the origin of our granite is from the Smith Quarries in Westerly, RI, via Quincy.

Richard Eastman

16 December 2009

 

 

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