Brownstone Rides Again

Where the favorite chocolate rock of the 19th century came from and why it's back.

By Regina Cole

	Romantic in color and readily carved, brownstone was the fad facing for Italianate-style row houses of the late 19th centuryÑespecially in New York City, where the ubiquitous buildings are known as brownstones. By 1900, however, the stone was decidedly pass . Photo Courtesy of James C. Massey

Some of the tools Mike Meehan, Rick Lane, and Mark Favale use to quarry brownstone in Portland, Connecticut, are pretty high-tech. There's state-of-the-art hydraulic machinery, computer surveying equipment, and even an expanding chemical called Silent Cracking Agent. Sophisticated stuff, indeed, but the task of extracting brownstone from the earth is still a labor-intensive process. Mike, Rick, and Mark split smaller blocks with hammers and wedges, just as quarrymen did a century ago. They wrestle 20-ton stone blocks onto flatbed trucks with a backhoe that, while perhaps easier to drive than teams of oxen, doesn't make moving this much mass any lighter work.

Most remarkable, however, is the fact that they're quarrying brownstone at all. Until 1993, when Mike leased an upper shelf at the historic Portland Brownstone Quarries and commenced operations, brownstone was strictly a historic material. Ubiquitous during the building boom of the 1870s and '80s, brownstone became the facing of choice for endless blocks of brick row houses in cities up and down the Eastern seaboard. By 1900, however, Americans were sick of brownstone, so when these row houses became a century old in the 1960s and ready for major repairs, the prime source for replacement stone was decades gone. Here's what this legendary building material is, why it was so coveted, and how it has come back for restoration work of all kinds today.

What Begat Brownstone?
When storm water poured into the Portland Brownstone quarries in 1936, the flood finished off a business whose market had been drying up for a generation. It was the end of a long era. As early as 1650, local builders were already using the dark brown or reddish brown sandstone for walls, foundations, and chimneys. At first they just collected rocks from cliff bases. About 1725, when the supply of loose stone was exhausted, they started to dig it out of the earth.

This was relatively easy. Brownstone is a soft, sedimentary stone that, here in Connecticut's Central Valley, is found in horizontal beds close to the earth's surface. It was deposited about 200 million years ago, when Africa and North America were wrenching away from each other to form the Atlantic Ocean. A series of continental rift basins, known collectively as the Newark Supergroup, formed as long, narrow, sediment-filled valleys stretching from Nova Scotia to South Carolina. One of them, the Hartford Basin, consists of deposits of sand and mud with a high feldspar content. These deposits are cemented with ferric oxides that give the stone its characteristic reddish-brown or chocolate-brown color. The geologic name for this deposit is the Portland Formation. The sandstone found in the Portland quarries belongs to the youngest and uppermost strata of those ancient layers. Many are infused with dinosaur footprints and the remains of ancient trees.

Connecticut doesn't have the only American brownstone. During the 19th century it was also quarried in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, in eastern New Jersey, in Pennsylvania, and in the Apostle Islands off the Wisconsin shore of Lake Superior. However, these are limited deposits that are steeply angled and difficult to quarry, with stone that varies in quality and appearance. In contrast, the planar beds of the Portland Formation, individually 2 to 18 thick, add up to more than 3,000 in thickness. Not only is Portland brownstone plentiful, easily quarried, and of a uniform red-brown color, but it is also conveniently close to that great presteam engine superhighway, the Connecticut River. Between 1890 and 1896 Portland's three main quarrying companies owned 50 schooners and one steamboat to transport the stone down the river and out into the wide world. The 1880 federal census reports that 78.6 percent of New York City buildings employing stone were all or part brownstone, most of which came from Portland.

Beautiful as it is, brownstone's sedimentary composition brings its own inherent limitation as a building material. When face-beddedÑthat is, applied vertically so that its layers are exposed to the elements-brownstone literally flakes off as the moisture that gets between the layers freezes and expands. Historic records show that brownstone sometimes began this characteristic flaking, known as spalling, as soon as 10 or 20 years after construction.

Mike theorizes that some of the spalling that contributed to our early 20th-century disenchantment with brownstone was the result of hasty, inferior construction. When brownstone is quarried from deep below the water table, as it was during Portland's boom decades, water is trapped between the layers. Historic quarrying annals refer to seasoning, which means allowing the stone to dry out, but seasoning takes timeÑand that's something no contractor wants to hear when there's a huge demand for new housing. Face-bedded stone, still full of water, was routinely applied to many of the 50,000 row houses built during the late 1800s Brown Decades. If it was done late in the season, just as freezing set in, the stone's disintegration was assured.

Naturally bedded stone, applied in the same direction as the stone's layers occur in nature, is resistant to weathering, but it does not present the pretty, uniform color seen in face-bedded brownstone. It is also a little harder to cut and, therefore, more expensive.

Stoned Again
Americans may have lost the taste for brownstone by 1900, but our cities remain full of it, and with time we have come to love its attributes all over again. When the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed much of San Francisco, the James Flood MansionÑa brownstone buildingÑwas a notable survivor. Still standing atop Nob Hill, it is now the Pacific Union Club. In 1737, John Hancock's prosperous uncle built a brownstone house in Boston. When it was demolished in the 1920s, public outrage helped grow the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. By the time a historic preservation movement took hold of the American imagination, brownstone was, like much of Victoriana, a sentimental favorite. After all, no other stone looks like chocolate. In fact, it was the brownstones of Brooklyn, New York, that gave birth in 1973 to a new publication called Old-House Journal.

Nonetheless, there are still no satisfactory ways to address that troublesome spalling. Early attempts to disguise (if not repair) the problem focused on applying layers of paint. The Back Bay area of Boston, for instance, was built primarily of brownstone-faced brick row houses between 1845 and 1880, but little of the dark stone is visible today because early owners painted most of those buildings. Later techniques involved encasing the ailing stone in aluminum or vinyl siding and faux brick. Paint and siding actually accelerate spalling because they trap moisture. Cement patches look terrible; the only way to hide them is to paint the brownstone.

Faced with miles of moldering brownstone, preservation-minded homeowners began to look for more appropriate repair optionsÑespecially given the emphasis the Secretary of the Interior's Guidelines places on in-kind material replacement for restoration work. The problem was, the only brownstone available after the 1930s was salvaged from demolished buildings. Before today's thriving architectural salvage industry existed, it was hard to find brownstone that matched your building. If you did, you then had to find someone who could cut it to size. The best alternative was to patch with a mixture of pulverized brownstone, portland cement, sand, and dry mortar colors. The results were far from perfect, but they beat vinyl siding.

Reinventing a Building-Block BusinessWhen Mike, a geologist by trade, started quarrying brownstone 10 years ago, he did it with an eye toward the replacement market. The first brownstone quarried in nearly 70 years left Mike's Portland Brownstone Quarry yard on a flatbed truck in 1994, headed for Barre, Vermont, where the 20-ton blocks were sawn into veneer panels to replace disintegrated stone on the chapel of Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. Today's finely calibrated cutting tools can produce sheets far thinner than the traditional 4 thickness, but Mike counsels caution. Since there's no historic precedent or modern track record for very thin brownstone, he recommends that veneers be at least 4 inches thick.

Much of the stone Mike and his associates produce today becomes replacement lintels, stair treads, sills, and ashlar (squared) blocks. New uses include pavers, like the stack of 2-thick slabs growing in the yard, ordered by a client who prefers brownstone to the more commonly used bluestone for his patio. A big new wood-frame house in an affluent suburb will rest on a brownstone water table. Another features the traditional combination of brick exterior walls with brownstone sills, steps, and lintels. Initially, Mike did not expect to do any fabrication in Portland; he saw his role strictly as quarrying. The growing demand for the stone, however, and the expense of shipping it to fabricators as far away as Vermont, often leads to Mike, Rick, and Mark wielding carbide tools under a makeshift canopy, where they face ashlar blocks with characteristic rock face and comb the top edges with vertical lines that help shed water.

The fudge-colored stone finds interior uses as well. Some, such as fireplace mantels, are historic, but one recent order comes directly from a designer's imagination. In Manhattan's posh new Mandarin Hotel there's a room-divider screen made of carved brownstone. If it's a sign the rich-looking rock is poised for another swing on the fashion pendulum, the Portland Brownstone Quarry will be ready for the ride.

Regina Cole is a regular OHJ contributor and the author of The New Flooring Idea Book (Rockport Publishers).

Special thanks to the folks at Portland Brownstone Quarries, 311 Brownstone Ave., Portland, CT 06480; (860) 342-2920; www.brownstonequarry.com.

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