Stories in Stone (3 page)

Ten years after starting at Amherst, Hitchcock’s life changed when he received a letter from a local doctor, James Deane.
Deane’s letter described “the tracks of turkeys in relief” from a slab of sandstone about to be used as a sidewalk in Greenfield,
Massachusetts.
¹⁴
Hitchcock ignored the letter until Deane finally sent plaster casts of the tracks.
Now convinced that they were tracks, Hitchcock
traveled to Greenfield to see the slab.
Within a year he had found more tracks in sidewalks in Northampton and Deerfield,
as well as in several quarries.
He had also seen the Noah’s Raven slab and collected enough additional tracks to publish America’s
first scientific paper on fossil tracks.
He called the nascent field ornithichnology, the study of stony bird tracks.
¹⁵

Hitchcock’s paper described seven species of track makers.
The casts and impressions ranged in size from the four-inch-long
Noah’s Raven to the massive
Ornithichnites giganteus
(gigantic stony bird tracks) with fifteen-inch-long feet and a six-foot-long stride.
Tracks of several different species walking
in different directions covered one slab.
Another showed one animal leaving over ten tracks in a steady line and most were
so distinct Hitchcock could determine the left and right foot.
He concluded that “they could not have been made by any other
known biped, except birds.”

Smitten with tracks, Hitchcock started collecting them himself.
He always wore his black suit and tie when out in the field,
although often he would sneak home late at night because he recognized that digging and transporting tracks was “not comporting
with the dignity of a professor.”
¹⁶
He even found and made a cast of tracks from a sidewalk on Greenwich Street in Manhattan.
Hitchcock later wrote that casting
the Greenwich tracks almost landed him in the local asylum: A former student saved him when she testified that he was “no
more deranged than such men usually are.”
¹⁷

His favorite track slab came from the Portland brownstone quarry.
It had been used for decades as a sidewalk, with the nontrack
side facing up, until yet another local doctor heard of Hitchcock’s interest in tracks and remembered he had seen unusual
markings on the slab when it had been laid in place.
(I wonder what all the sick people were doing while these doctors were
searching for tracks.) Called by Hitchcock the “gem of the Cabinet,” it shows mud cracks, worm tracings, and 54 beautifully
preserved track casts of several species.
¹⁸
By the time he died, Hitchcock had named 216 species from thirty-eight localities and published more than thirty reports,
including his magnum opus,
Ichnology of New England
, which contained some of the first photographs taken of fossils.

Hitchcock’s work took place at a critical time, when geologists were starting to refute the accepted dogma of the biblical
stories of Adam and Eve, Noah’s flood, and God’s creation.
In 1815 William Smith published the world’s first geological map,
which showed the geology of England and Wales.
Smith based his work on his observation that sedimentary strata contain fossils
that occur in a definite, predictable sequence and that these layers could be correlated between locations.
Combined with
Nicolas Steno’s law of superposition, which states that older rocks lay under younger rocks, Smith’s work made geology into
a three-dimensional science based on descriptive analysis instead of pure speculation.

Edward Hitchcock’s “gem of the Cabinet,” catalog number 9/14.

Fifteen years later, Charles Lyell published his seminal work,
Principles
of Geology
, which argued that natural laws did not change over time, therefore modern geologic processes acted in the same way and at
the same rate as they had in the past.
Lyell’s book helped establish that Earth was not created six thousand years ago but
must be very old because geologic phenomena, such as erosion and deposition, occurred so slowly that vast expanses of time
were necessary to produce the planet’s varied landscapes.

A third great advance came from Swiss-born geologist Louis Agassiz, whose
Étude sur les glaciers
in 1840 established the importance of ice in sculpting landscape.
Agassiz showed that a great and geologically recent ice
age was responsible for ice sheets that carved valleys, shoved moraines, and carried erratic boulders.
His work was another
critical step in helping to dispel the myth that catastrophes (i.e., biblical deluges) were responsible for modern geologic
features.

Finally, with Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
, published in 1859, geology also started to address the great biological questions.
Through careful observation, accumulation
of data, and formation of testable theories, geologists of the nineteenth century opened major doors in understanding the
history of Earth.
Plants and animals evolved and went extinct.
Landscapes changed, sometimes drastically, over time.
Earth
was a very old planet.
These are the central themes that still drive geology.

“It’s just stunning that all of this is coming together.
That the science of geology was just exploding,” said Sauter.
“Western
travelers are bringing back all of these fossil specimens and animals, like dodo skeletons and moa skeletons in the Pacific.
It’s all coinciding and all clashing with this biblical belief and there’s Hitchcock in the middle of this storm.
And he is
the first person to have the imagination to question the tracks.
To ask, What kind of animals made these footprints?
How could
prints be made in stone?
How old are these footprints?
He essentially creates an entire new field of science.”

When Hitchcock died, however, interest in the tracks faded.
A year after his death, the Civil War ended, people began to move
west, and they discovered hordes of dinosaur fossils.
Hitchcock’s tracks could not compete with the bones of
Tyrannosaurus rex
,
Stegosaurus
, and
Triceratops
.
But in the 1970s and 1980s, paleontologists returned to the tracks.
They began to ask new questions about dinosaur behavior.

Unlike bones, which tell the story of death, tracks record the action of a living animal.
Tracks show young and old dinosaurs
of the same species traveling together, different species visiting the same shoreline on the same day, and dinosaurs following
each other.
“In the 1950s we thought that dinosaurs were sluggish, solitary creatures that dragged their tails around behind
them,” said Sauter.
“And now we think of them as athletic and birdlike.
They were particularly vicious, and fast runners and
jumpers.
We found out all this information from these slabs.
These actual slabs.
It was really a revolution of thinking.”

“All the right things came together at the right time for brownstone,” said Alison Guinness, whose interest in the rock began
when her master’s thesis adviser at Wesleyan University received a grant to study the Portland quarry.
“It was easy to transport.
There were a large number of workers available.
Demand was growing, the rock was easy to quarry, and there was a lot of it.”
¹⁹

During three centuries of quarrying in Portland, workers extracted more than 270 million cubic feet of rock, or enough material
to build three copies of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
²⁰
It was shipped up and down the East Coast, overland to Chicago, and around Cape Horn to San Francisco.
“Brownstone was so
important to the local economy that they even moved a cemetery to get at the rock,” Guinness said, standing next to the old
quarry in Portland.

She knows the history of these quarries better than anyone.
When she began studying them, they had been forgotten and abandoned
for years.
“They were languishing.
They had filled with water and people dumped cars in them,” said Guinness.
“I quickly learned,
however, that these quarries were the ultimate site that shaped the entire brownstone industry.”

In 1686 James Stancliff became the first person to settle on the east side of the Connecticut River in what is now Portland.
The selectmen of Middletown, located on the west shore of the river, had given him the land called The Rocks so he could harvest
stone to build chimneys and cut gravestones.
Stancliff’s sons also joined the business, which they later sold to another family
of gravestone cutters, led by Thomas Johnson.
Their tombstones were the first Portland stone to be exported widely and show
up in cemeteries as far away as Newport, Rhode Island.

Guinness noted that Stancliff was not the first person to recognize the importance of the rocks that outcropped next to the
Connecticut River.
After Middletown’s settlement in 1650, locals had used the stone for foundations, steps, and walls.
Town
residents probably didn’t quarry the rock but simply pried the stone from ledges along the water and carried it away in carts
and scows, said Guinness.
As so often happens, word got out and non-Middletownians began to arrive at The Rocks with their
own picks, carts, and watercraft to remove stone.

Responding to such effrontery, the fine citizens of Middletown voted on September 4, 1665, “that whosoever shall dig or raise
stone at ye rocks on the East side of the Great River .
.
.
the diggers shall be none but an inhabitant of Middletown and
shall be responsible to ye town twelve pence per tunn .
.
.
to be paid in wheat and pease .
.
.”
²¹

The high value of grain and green vegetables seems to have quelled the stone stealers.
Locals resumed collecting rock and
felt so magnanimous with their bounty that they gave Stancliff his one-third acre at The Rocks.
Ten years later Stancliff
obtained another half acre, but by 1715 Middletownians were worried again.
This time they banned even locals from collecting
stone and transporting it out of town.
Scofflaws had to fork out twenty shillings per stone.
Concerned townsfolk also appointed
a quarry agent to enforce the rules at what was now known as the Town Quarry.

This round of posturing didn’t last long.
Using his skills as a gravestone cutter, Thomas Johnson quarried enough stone in
1737 to provide brownstone accents for a granite house in Boston for Thomas Hancock, John’s uncle.
Other rock began to make
its way down to New York and Newport for architectural trimmings, but quarrying stayed small scale because little demand existed
and transportation was challenging.

Quarrying in the early 1700s was still a crude affair.
If they didn’t collect rock from the surface, workers blasted it out
with black powder or knocked it off with an ax.
They were aided by how the sandstone formed.
During the monsoon seasons 200
million years ago, the rivers would flood and overflow their banks, each time depositing a sheet, or bed, of sand as thick
as five feet or as thin as half an inch.
Bedding created a flat surface ideal for building blocks.
Quarrymen also took advantage
of bedding because the contact zone between beds is weak—relative to the surrounding rocks—and is easier to pry apart.
Furthermore,
floods often deposited nearly pure beds of the same-sized sediments, which made the Portland rocks homogenous and easy to
work.
²²
These beds are clearly visible in the walls of the Portland quarry.
The most useful extend for hundreds of yards.

Earlier tectonic change also aided the quarrymen.
As Pangaea continued to break up, tectonic forces pushed and pulled the
valley.
Tension was released by a series of cracks or joints, later known to quarrymen as keys, that tended to run at ninety-degree
angles to the horizontal bedding.
These seams and bedding created four workable faces.
Masons needed only to cut two more
faces to form a block.
Subsequent generations of quarrymen exploited this geologic warp and weft on a much larger scale.