Stonework
The chimney of Kirby House is notable for the date embedded in it. But I
never realised how distinctive the stonework of the chimney is until I saw the
wall at Richfield's Fairview Cemetery and realized that it looked the exactly
the same as the chimmney! Then I began to think about what it was that
made it so.
Most stonework walls and fireplaces are made of rounded river rocks or sedimentary rock that naturally breaks along a flat line. But the stonework of Kirby House is rough cut and naturally angular stones in odd shapes, pink granite predominating. They fit together tightly, like a jigsaw puzzle, with the mortar between them raised and rounded, like a rope. I called Linda Fleming of the Richfield Historical Society to ask if the name of the stone mason for the cemetery wall was known. She not only knew his name was William B. Thompson, she had an article about him! Which she sent me!
The article was written in 1971 by Fran Murphy, columnist for the Akron Beacon Journal, and grandaughter of the stonemason! "Grandpa, born during the civil war, did boulderwork from the turn of the century. He retired in the 1930's after repairing a stone wall he built 25 years earlier at Fairview Cemetery in Richfield.... As a boy, [my] Uncle Carl helped his father with stone work. He recalled 'When Dad worked at the Marshall place [Greenwood Village in Sagamore Hills] he had four members of the Faubel family and Gardiner Parmalee working for him. Dad did the work on the house, but they finished the fence in front while he went hunting in Louisiana.' That surprised me because I had always looked at the wall along Ohio 82 as Grandpa's handiwork. Our conversation got around to Grandpa's building the receiving vault at Bath Cemetery. Uncle Carl remembers that they constructed a work shanty and 'we lived in tents. Even Mother came over and lived there.' I can see my tall, gentle grandmother 'keeping house' in a tent pitched at the edge of the cemetery."
There is other stone work at Crowell Hilaka. Some of the oldest are simple
and functional. They were made of the closest material to hand: the many
rocks easily pulled out of creeks. They were piled up as retaining walls
along cart paths (along the main camp road by the lower lake), to prevent
erosion on a cut bank (across the stream from Dear Leap trail), and made into
small dams which in turn made small fish ponds (remnants of a few here & there
around camp).
The most interesting is when two very different "styles" are juxtapositioned. There is a story to be read in the arrangement of the rocks! The Kirby album at the Historical Society has a series of small black and white photographs labeled "dam repair". The pictures show an old cobblestone dam that has been reinforced with a concrete face. But the cobblestones still stick out beyond the new concrete. This dam is easily recognizable to GS hikers as the dam just upstream of North House! Another such example is the spring in back of Kirby House, whose opening is lined with heavy, rounded river rocks, but is topped off with smooth concrete. My theory for historic stonework retrofitting results in a mnemonic device: Oviatts used ovals (the round river rocks); KIrby used concrete.
It would be neat to show these differences in stonework to the girls. Not so much that they learn William Thomson and Fran Murphy, but so they can learn to read the stories in the landscape or in a building. Who doesn't love looking for clues and putting them together? To start to understand how different materials can be used. A third grader may not care about "architecture". But what about building a fort? Or "playing house" where the first step is to BUILD your house? Building a dam, or a tower, or shaping the land, yeah - I think that would appeal to a lot of kids.
