Stories in Stone (42 page)

9.
Michael Gannon,
The New History of Florida
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 30.

10.
The best information on forts and life in St.
Augustine comes from Verne E.
Chatelain, “The Defenses of Spanish Florida
1565–1763,”
Carnegie Institution of
Washington Publication
511 (1941).
Other good information comes from Jeannette Connor, “The Nine Old Wooden Forts of St.
Augustine,” parts 1–2,
Florida
Historical Society Quarterly
IV (1967): 103–11, 171–80; Eugene Lyon, “The First Three Wooden Forts of Spanish St.
Augustine,”
El Escribano
34 (1997): 140–57; Albert Manucy, “Building Materials in 16th-Century St.
Augustine,”
El Escrib-ano
20 (1984): 51–71.

11.
Connor, “Nine Old Wooden Forts,” 110.

12.
Michael Gannon first coined this concept in his
Florida, A Short History
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), when he wrote that “by the time the Pilgrims came ashore at Plymouth, St.
Augustine was up for urban renewal.” Elsbeth Gordon added to Gannon’s phrase in her fascinating
Florida’s
Colonial Architectural Heritage
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002).
Floridians take deep umbrage at the prevailing idea that America’s colonial
story begins in Virginia and Massachusetts and not in Florida.

13.
Connor, “Nine Old Wooden Forts,” 172.

14.
Ibid., 172.

15.
The best description of Searles’s attack occurs in Luis Rafael Arana, “The Basis of a Permanent Fortification,” in
El Escribano
36 (1999), 3–11.

16.
Arana describes this maneuvering in detail, from
El Escribano
36.

17.
The History of Castillo de San Marcos
(St.
Augustine: Historic Print & Map Co., 2005).

18.
An article in the 1950s described thousands of goldfish swimming in abandoned coquina quarries.
People would travel to
the island to “pan gold.”

19.
Olaf Ellers, phone interview with author, December 2006.

20.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,
Cross Creek Cookery
(New York: Fireside, 1996), 16–17.

21.
Donald F.
McNeill, “Petrologic Characteristics of the Pleistocene Anastasia Formation, Florida East Coast” (master’s thesis,
University of Florida, 1983).

22.
Description of calcite, aragonite, formation, and seasoning based on author’s phone conversation with Donald McNeill,
January 2007.

23.
Based on author’s conversation with Roger Portell, Division of Paleontology, Florida Museum of Natural History, who kindly
showed me the ghost crabs and talked in depth about the deposition of the Anastasia Formation, Gainesville, Florida, January
2007.

24.
Description of life of
Donax
based on phone conversation with Olaf Ellers.
For more information consult his papers: “Biological Control of Swash-Riding,
in the Clam
Donax variabilis
,”
Biological Bulletin
189 (1995): 120–27, and “Discrimination Among Wave-Generated Sounds by a Swash-riding Clam,”
Biological Bulletin
189 (1995): 128–37.

25.
Albert Manucy,
The Houses of St.
Augustine
(St.
Augustine: St.
Augustine Historical Society, 1962).

26.
The following section on the construction of the castillo was pieced together from
The History of Castillo de San Marcos
and “The Defenses of Spanish Florida 1565–1763.”

27.
History of Castillo
, 28.

28.
Tabby, also called
piedra de ostion
(oyster stone), was made by mixing water and sand with lime and oyster shells.
The shells came from ancient Native American
middens.
Tabby was used primarily in the 1700s in buildings as far north as Charleston, South Carolina.

29.
George Fairbanks,
The Spaniards in Florida: Comprising the Notable Settlement of
the Huguenots in 1564 and the History and Antiquities of St.
Augustine
( Jacksonville, FL: Columbus Drew, 1868), 103.

30.
Kathyrn Hall Proby,
Audubon in Florida, with Selections from the Writings of John
James Audubon
(Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1974), 15.

31.
History of Castillo
, 43.

32.
British rule provides the framework for one of the few novels set in St.
Augustine.
Eugenia Price’s
Maria
is a fictionalized account of Mary Evans, who arrived in 1763 and became quite wealthy before losing her money in a May-December
marriage.
She died in 1792.
Neither particularly good nor bad, it does not, however, mention coquina.
St.
Augustine was also
the setting for one movie, an absolutely horrible attempt at comedy called
Illegally Yours
.
It does show the castillo, which has become the mansion of a rich oddball, who has decorated it with Greek statues and a
Chinese pagoda.
Gary Cooper also starred as a rebel soldier in a movie that shows the castillo, this time named Fort Infanta.
Distant Drums
focuses on the Seminole wars and features Cooper and a handful of men taking the fort.
Again no one notes the coquina but
one of Cooper’s men does note that the fort was designed by Enrico Garcia, one of Spain’s greatest military architects, and
that it is impossible to take with less than a brigade.

33.
Kathleen Deagan, “A New Florida & A New Century: The Impact of the English Invasion on Daily Life in St.
Augustine,”
El Esribano
39 (2002): 102–12.

34.
Alfred J.
Morrison, ed.,
Travels in the Confederation, 1783–1784.
From the German
of Johann David Schoepf
(New York: Bergman, 1968), 250.

35.
Proby,
Audubon in Florida,
17.

36.
Oddly, Audubon didn’t paint the fort.
George Lehman, a Swiss artist, who accompanied Audubon on his 1831–1832 trip down
the east coast of Florida, painted the castillo while they stayed in St.
Augustine ( January 1831).
This was not unusual.
Audubon often hired another artist to accompany him on his journeys, to paint plants and landscapes for use as backgrounds
in his prints, which allowed Audubon to concentrate on his birds.

37.
Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Palmetto-Leaves
(Boston: James Osgood and Co., 1873), 206.

38.
Gary Wilson, Lakeview Dirt Co., Inc., phone interview with author, February 2007.

6:
AMERICA
’
S BUILDING STONE

1.
Keith said that his analogy was to the holy trinity of Cajun cooking—onions, green pepper, and celery—and not to the better-known
holy trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Interview with author, Bloomington, Indiana, September 10, 2007.

2.
If you look at the back of a one-dollar bill, you will also see limestone.
The pyramids of Egypt are made of a fossil-rich
limestone.

3.
Amy Brier, interview with author, Bloomington, Indiana, September 12, 2007.

4.
Specifically the species is
Globoendothyra baileyi
.

5.
Todd Thompson, interview with author, Bloomington, Indiana, September 10, 2007.

6.
Until the late 1980s, scientists thought that stalked crinoids could not move, and until 2005 they had never photographed
one moving.
That year researchers in the Bahamas videotaped one crawling across the sandy bottom.
The animal had broken off
its holdfast and pulled itself along by its flexible arms.
It moved one to two inches per second and was last seen speeding
away from a determined and hungry sea urchin.

7.
Merrill,
Stones for Building
, 405.

8.
Ibid., 405.

9.
Joseph Batchelor, “An Economic History of the Indiana Oolitic Limestone Industry,”
Indiana Business Studies Study
27 (1944): 40.

10.
Ibid., 40.

11.
George Jones, interview with author, Bedford, Indiana, September 13, 2007.
I could not have seen all of the quarries and
mills and met their owners without the generous help of Jim Owens, executive director of the Indiana Limestone Institute,
the industry’s trade association.

12.
In past times the colors used to be buff and blue.
Originally buyers preferred blue over buff.
Blue or gray is the natural
color, with water oxidizing the stone to buff.

13.
Only one Indiana mill uses the giant bread-slicer-like gang saws described in chapter 4.
Bybee Stone has stuck with a
few gang saws because they give the stone a rougher, more rustic finish.
Their decision paid off in 2001, when they won the
contract to repair the Salem Limestone walls damaged by the September 11 bombing of the Pentagon.
By June 2002, Bybee had
sent 2.1 million pounds of cut limestone to Washington,D.C.

14.
Bob Thrasher, interview with author, Bloomington, Indiana, September 11, 2007.

15.
Will Bybee, interview with author, Ellettsville, Indiana, September 10, 2007.

16.
“The Great Rebuilding,”
Chicago Tribune
, October 9, 1872: 8.

17.
Ibid.

18.
The
Chicago Tribune
(August 20, 1876) called the bidding process “utter absurdity.” The board’s initial choice of contractor put in a bid of $895,000.
When that bid failed, the board, or “the Ring,” hoped to make their money by finding an architect who would help plunder the
system.

19.
Both quotes come from:
Twenty First Annual Report
, Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Indianapolis (1896): 323.

20.
Jim O’Connor, “Building Stones of Our Nation’s Capital,” unpublished manuscript, unknown date, 46.

21.
If you want to get a feel for the Indiana stone industry, I recommend the movie
Breaking Away
.
It takes place in Bloomington in the late 1970s and centers on four recent high school graduates, Dave,Moocher, Cyril, and
Mike.
Ostensibly about the relationship between mill workers, or Cutters, and college kids,
Breaking Away
is filled with the angst and self-doubt of young men who cannot follow their father’s footsteps.
“They’re gonna keep calling
us ‘Cutters.’ To them it’s just a dirty word.
To me it’s just something else I never got a chance to be,” says Mike.
Breaking Away
has some fine scenes of mills, abandoned quarries, and biking.

22.
Dale Enochs, interview with author, Bloomington, Indiana, September 11, 2007.

7:
POP ROCKS
,
PILFERED FOSSILS
,
AND PHILLIPS PETROLEUM

1.
Dorothy Smith, interview with author, Lamar, Colorado, July 10, 2007.

2.
Kirk Johnson, phone interview with author, July 2007.

3.
In one case, a well-known cartoonist was on vacation near what would become Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, in
Colorado, and saw a piece of petrified wood that he wanted for his home garden.
Since the wood was on private land, he was
able to buy it.
His wife, however, didn’t want the fossil at home so it ended up in the cartoonist’s amusement park, Disneyland.

4.
Lester Ward, “Sketch of Paleobotany,”
Fifth Annual Report United States Geological
Survey
(1885): 385.

5.
From a letter to John Ray, quoted in
Three Physico-Theological Discourses
(New York: Arno Press, 1978), 190.

6.
J.
B.
Delair and W.
A.
S.
Sarjeant, “The Earliest Discoveries of Dinosaurs: The Records Reexamined,”
Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association
113 (2002): 185–97.

7.
Commentary on Chapter 2, Verse 12 of Genesis, from
Luther’s Works, Volume 1
(Lectures on Genesis Chapters 1–5)
(St.
Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955), 98.