Granite House

“ The next day, the 22nd of May, the arrangement of their new dwelling was commenced. In fact, the settlers longed to exchange the insufficient shelter of the Chimneys for this large and healthy retreat, in the midst of solid rock, and sheltered from the water both of the sea and sky. Their former dwelling was not, however, to be entirely abandoned, for the engineer intended to make a manufactory of it for important works. Cyrus Harding's first care was to find out the position of the front of Granite House from the outside. ”

“ The colonists, not having any pressing work out of doors, profited by the bad weather to work at the interior of Granite House, the arrangement of which was becoming more complete from day to day. The engineer made a turning-lathe, with which he turned several articles both for the toilet and the kitchen, particularly buttons, the want of which was greatly felt. ”

“ The houses are built of brick, and generally have steps up to them, by which arrangement the area receives much more light; and many people with very fine large houses live almost exclusively in these basements, only using the other apartments for some swell party: the better class of houses, large hotels, and some of the shops, have their fronts faced with stone of a reddish brown, which has a warm and pleasant appearance. The famous "Astor House" is faced with granite, and the basement is of solid granite. ”

“ They built with cob, and with oak windows, or else in stone with granite mullions, but neither material allowed of great splendour. A house in granite cost about three times as much as one of a like size in brick. ”

“ The house is build of freestone from cellar to garret. The facade on the court-yard has a portico with a double range of steps, the wall of which is covered with vestiges of carvings now effaced by time, but in which the eye of an antiquary can still make out in the centre of the principal mass the Hand bearing the sword. The granite steps are now disjointed, grasses have forced their way with little flowers and mosses through the fissures between the stones which centuries have displaced without however lessening their solidity. ”

“ The mansion house has been owned and occupied by wealthy families ever since it was built. It is considered one of the most picturesque homes in New England. Unlike other houses built at that period, the walls, which are two feet thick, were made of granite interspersed with stone and brick, over which a thick overlay of plaster was placed, and having arched doorways and windows and small niches introduced over the door. The wooden additions at the back were built for the use of servants. The porch of the house is unique. ”

“ Granite is also a stone that will resist the waves without wearing, and it is therefore a matter of consideration, whether granite stone might not be had from Peterhead or Aberdeen for this purpose. Granite, it is true, cannot conveniently be had [453] in such large blocks as the Kingoodie stone, but it may be had in blocks sufficiently large to answer the purpose, and, if well dove-tailed, and properly cemented together, the whole may be made to act as one solid body of rock. ”

“ Then, to remedy the evil, the whole face of the house is tarred over or cemented, with what result to the prospect may well be conceived. The granite, though pervious, is so to a very limited extent when compared with limestone, and through a granite country there are no springs that issue from subterranean reservoirs. All the rain that falls on the surface runs off superficially, but not all at once, for on the granite lie enormous beds of peat, the growth and decomposition of moor plants through vast ages. ”

“ Still I have seen them, of more humble dimensions, laid in good cement, as such walls always should be laid, that seem as firm as unbroken granite. But you will remember I only advise this mode of building on the condition that you are not ambitious of height. If you are, by all means curb your aspirations, or else buy a city house six or seven stories in the air, where you can gratify your passion for going up and down stairs. There is the best reason in the world why a tall house in the country should look grim, gaunt, and awkward ”

“ The chief feature is a pergola of lofty granite columns reached from the house, and rising from a little promontory that projects from the bluff. It can be seen for a long distance and invests with a classical character the earliest impression of the city. The mansion is spacious, containing thirty large apartments, and is entered through an extensive courtyard under a monumental gate. For several years it has been occupied as a school for engineers. ”

“ It is a hundred feet from curb to curb, and on either side, not cramped and crowded together, as is our European fashion, but each standing in its own grounds, and built equidistant from and in similar style to the rest, are a series of splendid, single-storied mansions, all of red granite. ”

“ The doors are often beautiful in themselves: their panels of true proportions framed in delicately moulded pilasters with a line of glazing to light the tiny hall; frequently a pediment above protects the whole from the dripping of eaves. And before paint was used to mask the wood, the whole structure, played upon by sun and storm, wore to a tone of silver-gray that made a house as familiar to the soil as a lichen-covered rock. The square Georgian mansions came later, with the prosperity of reviving trade after the Revolution. ”

“ Anne let herself in at the iron gates, thinking to herself that it was very strange that no farmhouse had been rebuilt there on the site of the old one, that no labourer had been allowed to work the rich garden as his allotment, and that it was impossible to guess why everything should have been let go to ruin except the square dove house of red brick, which must have stood for three centuries and which looked as if it would stand for as many more. ”

“ The effect is bad. Unhappily, local architects are as blind to local characteristics as London architects are ignorant of them. So also, when these gentry attempt to design hood mouldings, or indeed any mouldings, for execution in granite, they cannot do it—the result is grotesque, mean, and paltry: they think in Caen stone and Bath, and to design in granite a man's mind must be made up in granite. ”

“ A heavy, square, roomy, red-brick mansion, with its windows cased in white stone, and a coat-of-arms sculptured in the same material, but now nearly undecipherable, inserted over the heavy mahogany hall-door,--the Vale House belonged to a period of architecture when contract-building was unknown, when the art of "running-up" houses was yet undiscovered, and a family mansion among the middle-classes meant a house in which fathers and sons and grandsons intended to live and die, unbeguiled by "splendid opportunities" into constant migrations and rapid changes in their style and manner of living. ”

“ Standing back from the street behind a granite curb and iron paling is the old mansion, its dimensions being sixty-four feet by forty-six feet, and containing fifteen large rooms. The exterior was built of brick, over which were placed huge, bevelled, wooden clapboards, more than two feet in width, and one and a half in height. From a distance the observer might mistake the gray of the exterior for stone, as the block style of construction was employed, the wooden cube being painted and sanded to resemble dark gray rock. ”

“ The new Grindstone, of all the Temples of Finance within the town, was to be the most impressive, the most imposing, the most unmitigatedly monumental. The bold young architect had loftily renounced all economies of space, time, material, and had imagined a grandiose facade with a long colonnade of polished blue-granite pillars, a pompous attic story above, and a wide flight of marble steps below. ”

“ Listen, Madison, don't talk about what you don't know anything about. The stuff in these walls isn't just rock; it isn't even plain granite. Granite City exports some of the finest grade of the stone in the world. And it's used all over the world. We aren't just a bunch of meatheaded ditch diggers—we are craftsmen. We have to figure a different way of getting out every piece of stone. ”

“ The mansion is built and decorated within; artists fit the tiles together in a mosaic of cool colours, and carve, and gild, and paint the little pieces of cedar-wood, and glue them into the light and pointed arches; the rich curtains are hung, and the master enters into his possession. There follows the procession of the generations. The tiles crack, the woodwork of the arches splits and falls, and the walls break and crumble. The householder sits indifferent, and the whole house corrodes. ”

“ The houses are, in general, small, and built of wood; but some of them have foundations of granite, which is the only kind of stone in the country. The total want of limestone, and the scarcity of brick-earth, render it here extremely difficult and expensive to give to buildings any degree of stability. ”

“ Wealth can transport from a distance the materials of the castle or mansion, but poverty must be content to rear the cottage from the adjoining pit or quarry. The excellent granite and porphyry of this district afford the finest materials for building, and give to the churches and gentlemen's houses a most substantial and beautiful character. Many of the cottages are built of the same materials, but the greater proportion are constructed of clay and straw closely intermixed. ”

“ These are the elements with which the walls are constructed, from black buttress below to alabaster tower above. All of these elements weather in different forms and are painted in different colors, so that the wall presents a highly complex facade. A wall of homogeneous granite, like that in the Yosemite, is but a naked wall, whether it be 1,000 or 5,000 feet high. Hundreds and thousands of feet mean nothing to the eye when they stand in a meaningless front. ”

“ The present mansion, remodelled, is to-day a famous landmark. It is considered an excellent example of a colonial home, with its pitched roof, its huge stone chimneys covered with mortar, its dormer windows, and its Georgian porch. One enters through the wide doors into a noble hallway extending entirely through the house, the woodwork showing fine panelling of white pine. The box stairs rise by easy treads to the wide landing, where a colonial window gives light to the apartment. ”

“ So hard was the granite with which the passage leading to the King’s and Queen’s Chambers was closed, that in one case the thieves despaired of ever getting through it, so they laboriously cut a way through the roof of the passage and clambered over the top of the granite block. They must have reaped a very rich booty, of which every trace has long since vanished.
All that remains to-day is the red granite sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber. It is an enormous stone coffin, so big that its removal is an impossibility. ”

“ The blackened walls of granite rose with uncompromising abruptness, unbroken by niche or shelf, to a ceiling whose vague outlines were lost in darkness. A truss of straw was thrown in one corner of the apartment, and upon it was spread a rough woolen counterpane. Three flattened blocks of stone, placed at intervals along the walls, served as benches; in the center a rock-table, carefully smoothed and large enough for a banquet fairly regal in its dimensions, rose four feet from the floor. ”

“ The house I have been describing was still called The Grange, and such as I have stated had been its original destination. The long building had been the real grange or barn of a neighboring abbey; the taller building had been added afterward for the convenience of the abbot's bailiff. When the monasteries were suppressed by the arch plunderer Henry VIII., we all know how many and how great were those who shared in the pickings of the defunct fowl of Rome. The Grange and the farm attached to it fell to the lot of a nobleman in the neighborhood, together with much other valuable property. ”

“ To see the once fine smooth gravel walks, overgrown with grass—the redundances of the shrubbery neglected—the once finely painted pricket fences, rusted and fallen down—a fine garden in splendid ruins—the lofty ceiling of the mansion thickly curtained with cobwebs—the spacious apartments abandoned, while the only music heard within as a substitute for the voices of family glee that once filled it, was the crying cricket and cockroaches! ”

“ Nevertheless, the main division is so clear, and the handling throughout so vigorous, as to carry off even a more serious defect. Nothing of its kind could be more impressive than the rugged expanse of masonry, of which the bonding is expressed throughout, and which in the granite basement becomes Cyclopean in scale, and in{133} the doorway especially Cyclopean in rude strength. The great pile is one of the most interesting as it is one of the most individual examples of American commercial building. ”

“ The wide projection of these roofs not only secures their galleries from the snows, but affords convenient shelter for their fire-wood and various other articles. A granary is sometimes built over the dwelling-rooms at the top of these houses, which is rendered attainable by means of a sort of bridge (moveable, I rather think) , upon which we ourselves witnessed the singular spectacle of a cart and horses conveying a load of grain to this exalted store-chamber. These wooden fabrics, although one would not suppose so, are warmer than those of brick or stone ”