Stories in Stone (43 page)

8.
Ward, “Sketch,” 390–91.

9.
When I lived in Moab, Utah, I heard of one of the rarer petrifying agents, uranium.
A friend told me of fossilized wood
where uranium ore had replaced entire trees, which had been mined limb by limb.

10.
Description of formation of petrified wood based on phone interview with George Mustoe, geologist at Western Washington
University, August 8, 2007.

11.
Granger was not the first to find this cabin.
William Reed and Frank Willis-ton had also seen it in the 1870s but they
concluded that the bones, which a fellow paleontologist referred to as “head cheese,” were too deteriorated for further exploration.
The best information on these discoveries comes from two papers: John McIntosh, “The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush,”
Earth Sciences
Monthly
9, no.1 (1990): 22–27, and Vincent Morgan and Spencer G.
Lucas, “Walter Granger, 1872–1941, Paleontologist,”
New Mexico Museum of
Natural History and Sciences
19, (2002).

12.
The Texas Tourist Camp in Decatur, Texas, and the Petrified Wood Park in Lemmon, South Dakota, also feature petrified
wood structures.
Both were built in the 1930s and both are on the National Register of Historic Places.

13.
James Agee, “The Great American Roadside,”
Fortune
(September 1934): 53–63, 172, 176–77.

14.
William Kaszynski,
The American Highway: The History and Culture of Roads in
the United States
( Jefferson, NC : McFarland & Company, Inc., 2000), 40–42.

15.
John Jakle and Keith A.
Sculle,
The Gas Station in America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 51.

16.
Ibid., 52.

17.
Warren James Belasco,
Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel,
1910–1945
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979), 35.

18.
Michael Karl Witzel,
The American Gas Station
(Osceola,WI: Motorbooks International, 1992), 34.

19.
Jakle and Sculle,
Gas Station
, 58.

20.
Witzel,
American Gas,
60.

21.
Carolyn Peyton, interview with author, Lamar, Colorado, July 10, 2007.

22.
Greg Emick, interview with author, Lamar, Colorado, July 10, 2007.

23.
Quoted in
Lamar Daily News
, November 17, 1978.

8:
THE TROUBLE WITH MICHELANGELO
’
S FAVORITE STONE

1.
All quoted phrases come from Edward Durell Stone
, Evolution of an Architect
(New York: Horizon Press, 1962).
They are found on pages 149, 143, 143, and 151, respectively.

2.
Ms.
Swearingen’s quote from 1970 is referred to in an article in the
Chicago
Sun-Times
, March 7, 1989.

3.
All information on building, examination, and cladding of the Amoco Building is from Ian R.
Chin
, Proceedings of the Seminar on the Recladding of the Amoco
Building in Chicago, IL Held on November 11, 1993
(Chicago: The Chicago Committee on High Rise Buildings, 1994).

4.
John Logan, phone interview with author, November 2007.

5.
Chin,
Proceedings
, 4–1.

6.
Information based on phone interview with Jon Mendelson and Karen D’Arcy, Division of Science, Governors State University,
April 2007.

7.
Giorgio Vasari,
Lives of the Artists
, trans.
Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 415.

8.
Most of the details in the following section comes from work originally collected by William Wallace in his fascinating
and thorough
Michelangelo
at San Lorenzo: The Genius as Entrepreneur
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
I could not have put together this story of Michelangelo without Dr.
Wallace’s
book and his generosity in answering my numerous questions.

9.
Michelangelo to Domenico Buoninsegni, May 2, 1517,
Letters Translated from
the Original Tuscan
, ed.
E.
H.
Ramsden (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1963), 105–7.

10.
Michelangelo to Domenico Buoninsegni, January 1519,
Letters
, 123.

11.
Using the trench and wedge technique, the Egyptians quarried a block 137 feet long weighing 1,168 tons.
A flaw in the
stone prevented it from being used and it still rests in the quarry at Aswan.
By the fifth century BCE, according to Xenophon,
the Greeks had developed quarries in Piraeus large enough to hold hundreds of prisoners of war from Syracuse.

12.
Michelangelo to Buonarroto di Lodovici Simoni, July 28, 1515,
Letters
, 93.

13.
Michelangelo to Derto da Filicaia, August 1518,
Letters
, 117–18.

14.
Michelangelo to Pietro Urbano, April 20, 1519,
Letters
, 124–25.

15.
Charles Dickens,
Pictures from Italy
(London: William H.
Colyer, 1846), 35–36.

16.
Michelangelo to Lionardo, December 21, 1518,
Letters
, 121.

17.
In February 2007 Gabriele Morolli, an architectural historian in Florence, reported that he had found three of Michelangelo’s
columns in Pisa.
He transported one to Florence and planned to dig up the others.
Many art historians remain skeptical of
Morolli’s find, and no information has been forthcoming since the discovery.

18.
Michelangelo to unknown, possibly Ser Bonaventura di Leonardo, March 1520,
Letters
, 128, 130–31.

19.
The great classics archaeologist John Ward-Perkins used this phrase.

20.
Rodolfo Lanciani,
Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 243.

21.
J.
Clayton Fant, “The Roman Emperors in the Marble Business: Capitalists, Middlemen or Philanthropists,” in
Classical Marble: Geochemistry, Technology,
Trade
, ed.
Norman Herz and Marc Waelkens (Dordrect,Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 147–59.

22.
“This marble is known to Roman stone-cutters as Marmo Greco Fetido (fetid Greek marble) and Marmo cipolla (onion marble),
because when sawn it emits a fetid odour”: Mary Winearls Porter,
What Rome Was Built With: A
Description of the Stones Employed in Ancient Times for its Building and Decoration
(London: Henry Frowde, 1907), 77.
This is not an unusual phenomenon; organic remains in the rock can disintegrate and form
a sulfurous gas, which gets trapped in the crystal lattice.
Breaking the stone releases the gas.

23.
Giuseppe Bruschi, Antonio Criscuolo, Emanuela Paribeni, and Giovanni Zanchetta, “14C-dating from an old quarry waste dump
of Carrara marble (Italy): evidence of pre-Roman exploitation,”
Journal of Cultural Heritage
5 (2004): 3–6.
This early date has not been widely accepted.

24.
During the first excavation of Marmorata, in 1868, workers found over twelve hundred large blocks of marble and several
thousand cut slabs.
Pope Pius XII controlled the dig, which has been called an appalling operation because of the lack of
detailed records.
The pope used the ancient stones to rebuild churches throughout Italy and to reset the marble paving around
the Pantheon.
He also sent material across Europe and as far away as Argentina.
Clayton Fant argues convincingly that much
of the Marmorata material was substandard or defective and therefore rejected, as opposed to other archaeologists who argue
that overproduction and oversupply led to abandonment of the stone at Marmorata.

25.
Jerry Brotton,
The Renaissance Bazaar: From Silk Road to Michelangelo
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 106.

26.
James Ackerman,
The Architecture of Michelangelo
(London: A.
Zwemmer, 1961), 139.

27.
Reactions to the Master: Michelangelo’s Effect on Art and Artists in the Sixteenth
Century
, ed.
Francis Ames-Lewis and Paul Joannides (Burlington,VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), 143.

28.
Ackerman,
Architecture
, 6.

29.
Gloria Ciarapica and Leonsevero Passeri, “Late Triassic and Early Jurassic Sedimentary Evolution of the Northern Apennines:
An Overview,”
Bollettino
della Societa Geologica Italiana
124 (2005): 189–201.

30.
Leonsevero Passeri and Federico Venturi, “Timing and Causes of Drowning of the Calcare Massiccio Platform in Northern
Apennines,”
Bollettino della
Societa Geologica Italiana
124 (2005): 247–58.

31.
L.
Carmignani and R.
Kligfield, “Crustal Extensions in the Northern Apennines: The Transition from Compression to Extension
in the Alpi Apuane Core Complex,
Tectonics
9, no.
6 (1990): 1275–303.

32.
Carlo Baroni, Giuseppe Bruschi, and Adriano Ribolini, “Human-Induced Hazardous Debris Flows in Carrara Marble Basins (Tuscany,
Italy),”
Earth Surface
Processes and Landforms
25 (2000): 93–103.

33.
Other marbles may have impurities of iron or manganese oxides, which generate red, yellow, cream, or pink marbles.
So
called “green marble” is the metamorphic rock serpentine.

34.
John Logan, “On-Site and Laboratory Studies of Strength Loss in Marble on Building Exteriors,” in
Fracture and Failure of Natural Building Stones: Applications
in the Restoration of Ancient Monuments
, ed.
S.
K.
Kourkoulis, (Berlin: Springer, 2006), 345–62.

35.
Stone
, Evolution of an Architect
, 141.

36.
Standard Oil’s 1972 annual report lists 46,627 employees.
No number was kept on how many had training in geology, but
it seems logical that many of them must have had a geologic background.
How else do you find oil?

9:
READING
,
WRITING
,
AND ROOFING

1.
Slate pencils were made of soapstone or softer slate and left a light, erasable mark on the tablets.
Curiously, between
1867 and 1904, the
NewYork Times
reported on six children dying from slate pencil wounds; nearly all of the youth fell on their pencils by accident.

2.
Stephen Ambrose,
Duty, Honor, Country: a History of West Point
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), 19.

3.
Another missionary, Reverand John Williams, wrote in his memoir that students on the Cook Islands in 1833 lacked chalk
for writing so broke off the spines of a sea urchin, burnt them slightly, and used the spines for writing.
The spines came
from the slate pencil urchin,
Heterocentrotus
mammillatus
, and had been used for centuries as files to make bone and shell fishhooks.

4.
Modern blackboards are no longer made of slate.
They may be ceramic-coated steel, or enameled or painted composites.
Manufacturers
consider the ceramic boards to be more durable, with a shelf life of fifty years.
Not bad unless you consider that slate boards
from the early 1900s still look as good as the day they went up.

5.
I could not have written about the geology of slate without several thorough and helpful phone conversations with Jack
Epstein.
Dr.
Epstein also read a draft of this chapter.

6.
The statistics on use of slate, as well as subsequent information on the change from Welsh to American slate, come from
Jeffrey S.
Levine, “An history of the United States slate industry (1734–1988)” (Master’s thesis), Cornell University, 1988).

7.
Boston Building Ordinances, 1631–1714,
Journal of Society Of Architectural Historians
20, no.
2 (1961): 90–91.

8.
Samuel Carpenter built the house, which later served as home for William Penn and William Trent, founder of Trenton.
It
was razed in 1867.

9.
There is little evidence that the Peach Bottom Slate won any award in London in 1851.
According to the official archives
of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, no slate from Pennsylvania was entered at the show.
The earliest reference to the award
that I could find is an article in the July 30, 1910, magazine
The Mining
World
.
Seems a bit odd that there is no mention of this from any newspaper of the day.
I suspect we will never know exactly how
the story got started.