When was the last time you looked in awe at something manmade: stared at the Golden Gate in the setting sun, stepped into the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York and heard the sound of hushed voices echoing back to you off of the high vaulted ceilings, or stood atop the Empire State Building and felt it swaying gently back and forth beneath you? They seem larger than life, don't they? It hardly seems possible that they were built by the hand of man.
Once I built a tower, up to the sun,
brick and rivet and lime.
Once I built a tower, now it's done —
Brother, can you spare a dime?
How about a little story, for Labor Day evening? This one isn't about the construction workers, who are at least occasionally remembered, if only by fatality count. (The Golden Gate cost 11 lives, the Empire State Building 14.) No, these people are even less remembered than the nameless construction workers, but without them the architecture, the monuments, the very face of the East would be very different today.
After the American Civil War, in the late 19th century America was growing up, and it wanted the world to know it. There was suddenly a huge demand in such places as Washington, DC and New York City for high-quality building materials. I won't call it a national inferiority complex, but there was definitely a thought that if we wanted to be a 'real' country, our cities would have to be just as impressive as those of the 'old world'. (As to whether we achieved that, well, no comment.)
At that time there was still plenty of local lumber, and metals were used in relatively small quantities, but the demand for stone was enormous, and unfortunately there were no good sources of building quality stone nearby. So New York and DC looked to the North... far to the North. Specifically, there were huge supplies of excellent quality granite near the coast of Maine, and on islands off the coast.
There were really only two problems. First, that granite had to be excavated, shaped, and sometimes polished. This is an enormous task, and a highly skilled job to boot: the residents of Maine couldn't have hoped to fill the needs themselves. Immigrants flooded into coastal Maine, mostly from Italy, in response to the demand.
The job was brutal, both because of the difficulty of the work and the stone dust, which caused silicosis (a deadly lung disease), then known (I think) as 'Stonecutter's Tuberculosis'. I haven't found any statistics on life expectancy, but this quote from a quarry worker (taken from here, talking about strikes in 1938-1939) about sums up the situation:
The big worry of some of [the quarrymen] is that they'll die before they have made good provision for their families. That's the real reason behind the strikes. They feel that since they're 'marked' men with perhaps less time to provide for their families than the average man, that they are entitled to higher wages. Besides there are certain periods in the year - we call them slack time and dead time - when there is little work to be done. Sometimes only a few men work during these slow weeks; sometimes, none at all.
Which is to say that they are resigned to dying early, but they want to make enough money to keep their family afloat after they're gone, at least until their sons are old enough to start working in the quarries.
(The following two images are originally from here.)
As if that weren't enough, well, now you had some enormous chunks of stone — the columns for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (above) were so humongous that they snapped of their own weight while sitting on the lathe, and had to be redone in two pieces. The railroads did, of course, exist in those days, but they were pretty lightweight things, and were certainly not up to the task of transporting that kind of weight. So the columns were carried down to the water in enormous horse-drawn wagons called 'Galamanders':
They were then loaded onto schooners and sailed South along the coast. (This picture is from here.)
Just imagine that: an enormous sailing ship, more than a hundred feet long, with between two and six masts (most were two), carrying hundreds of tons of rock hundreds of miles along the coast. You might think that this sort of work would be hard on a ship, and you'd be right. A common practice was for an owner to use his ship on other commerse until it was literally falling apart, and then send it off for a few runs full of stone, which would finish off the deal. Some enterprising gentlemen of means would buy old ships, well past their sell-by date, and staff them with the cheapest sailors they could find, and do stone runs until the ship went down.
And go down they did. There is a reason that there are 68 lighthouses along the coast of Maine alone: it is hell to sail in any inclement weather, and was worse before all the lighthouses. There are places along that coast where the waves have been known to roll seventy-five ton boulders around like baubles. In that environment, you can bet that a lot of ships were lost, in storms or just from sheer disintegration from their heavy loads. And more people died, so that our nation could have its monuments.
I'm not going to argue wrong or right here. Many of these monuments will be around long after I curl up and die, a monument to those stonewrights and sailors who provided the raw materials to build a new nation. (Many of them won't: c.f. poor old Penn Station, New York, which was demolished in an orgy of 'modernization'.) But next time you get out to New York, or Washington, D.C., or one of the surrounding areas, and you're looking at the architecture, spare a thought for those people who made it all possible.
(Incidentally, historical corrections are welcome: I Am Not A Historian. Additionally, WebShots appears to suck since you can't embed full-sized pictures. I guess I'll try a different one next time.)
(Note: I originally got interested in this subject due to a song by Steve Romanoff, called Boats of Stone.)
To the hands and to the boats who cut the stones and pulled the ropes,
To the children and their hopes in dark December,
To the labor of the crew, their weary vessel would get through,
We give the credit where it's due and we'll remember.